


The Space Around Him

by rainylemons



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blindness, Curtain Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 08:50:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainylemons/pseuds/rainylemons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the spn_gen_bigbang. Two years ago Sam Winchester went blind after an opportunistic infection ruined his optic nerve. He and Dean have since settled down, but Sam's still struggling to learn the difference between adapting and coping. Fortunately, he has an awesome brother, a therapist, a few exotic dancers, and a canary named Phil to help him out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space Around Him

  


The dream wasn’t special. If pressed, he supposed that he would summarize the dream by saying ‘nothing much happened.’ But, Sam remembers the crystal clear quality of his vision in the dream, remembers each glint of the sun refracted a thousand times back at him from the soap bubbles on the Impala and how he’d laughed when his brother, maybe ten, maybe twelve, had run from the garden hose they were using to wash the bad ass beast that was the Winchester family car, and in some ways as close to a home as they had. It wasn’t much, then, just a dream, maybe more of a memory of washing the car under the unforgiving August sun while their father sat nearby nursing a cold beer and smiling at them a little tentatively like he knew he should chastise them for screwing around, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.  It was nothing, really. Nothing dark, nothing twisted – nothing sexy or amazing or remotely profound. But when Sam wakes to find the ever present darkness waiting for him, he scowls and waits for the bitterness to pass.

Two years since the infection ruined his optic nerve and left him blind, two years of learning Braille, counting steps, and finding ways to adapt to this handicap, and Sam still hasn’t woken once without feeling angry and pissed that he can only see in his dreams. It doesn’t matter that he knows instantly that it’s still the dead of night simply by the sounds of the house around him and the stillness of the floorboard beneath his bare foot when he kicks one long leg out from beneath his blankets to rest it on the wooden floor. All of his life, he’s been able to open his eyes and see the moonlight or sunlight in the room around him, it’s never taken more than a simple glance at the alarm clock to tell him exactly what time it is and to see what’s going on around him.

He could roll over and hit the Braille embossed button on the clock next to his bed. The tinny and somehow hollow voice of the tiny machine would tell him the time, down to the seconds if he really wants it to, but Sam doesn’t touch it, just listens and tries to guess the time. He tells himself that it’s a game, just another way to force himself to adapt, but some small part of him thinks that he’s intentionally making it harder on himself, some kind of self-inflicted torture because if being blind sucks, then he’s going to make it suck as much as he possibly can and just fucking wallow in it. Dean’s logic is there in that sentence, Dean’s admonishments and probably Doctor Milner’s too and Sam supposes this is why he schleps to his therapist’s office twice a month.

There’s very little sound at the moment. Two years ago, no matter how observant he liked to think he was, Sam would have said it was dead silent. Even with the quiet of the house, it’s not true now. He can hear himself breathe, can even hear Dean breathe in the room across the hall when he cocks his head properly to really listen for it. The Tibideaux dog is barking a few blocks away – maybe at a raccoon, maybe at a possum, maybe just because it’s a big lonely dog that doesn’t understand why it gets chained to a tree every night. The birds haven’t started in yet and Sam knows that this means that the sky hasn’t even thought of lightening, that dawn’s still a couple hours away. There’s no sound of scrabbling feet on metal from the living room, signaling that Phil the family canary doesn’t think it’s time to be up yet either. For all that he’s a domesticated bird, he seems to take his cue from the local avian wildlife and won’t make a sound in the night unless, as Dean’s been known to say, something bites him in the ass. From far off, Sam catches the distant wail of the train. Tracks run behind the house and even though they’re on a hill and the train tracks are down in a ravine, the windows will still rattle, the floor will vibrate, and the engineer will pull his whistle again when he’s in the thick of the houses on the outskirts of Rafferty because he is, as Dean claims, a sadistic fuck in serious need of a beat down.

If the train’s running on time, Sam figures it must be twelve minutes after four. It’s too early to be up and, feeling a little sadistic himself, he thinks that if he goes back to sleep, he might dream again – this time of the ocean or the open road or the color of Jess’s golden hair in the sun. It won’t put him in a better mood if he dreams of these things and wakes up for a second time feeling cheated, feeling robbed and broken and bitter, but it sounds less lonely than tip-toeing through house as quietly as he can to keep from waking Dean who gets home from work late most every night.

Sam’s just pulling his leg back into bed when the quality of the air in the house changes. There’s nothing supernatural here, not any longer. They’d gotten the place for the bargain price of ten-thousand dollars because of its ramshackle state and long history of haunting, but that salt and burn had been Sam’s last and the house has been quiet since, giving them ample time to put Dean’s construction and rehab experience to good use. Because the town ghost is long gone and demons, angels, and the myriad beasts and monsters from their old life don’t seem to give a shit about two washed up hunters, one of them blind and the other an alcoholic struggling to maintain the balance between a couple of beers and outright drunkenness, there’s nothing overtly evil seeping into the air now. Sam doesn’t smell the shit of frolicking demons, doesn’t hear the musical, mean laugh of fairies tracking down their wayward princeling. The air doesn’t turn cold and nothing creaks or bangs in the walls. It’s nothing he can really put a finger on, nothing that he supposes he would have noticed before he went blind or maybe something he’s learned to acknowledge _because_ of all the years of wariness in his old life, but Sam goes still, leg half out of bed beneath his heavy Amish made quilt.

He’s listening as he pushes himself up on his elbows. He cocks his head, slows his breathing until it barely makes a sound and waits. There’s nothing for a long moment, he can hear a faint scritch from the birdcage in the living room as Phil sidesteps in his sleep. The glass in the windows starts to vibrate with a slight, chilly sounding hum as the train out of Chicago draws closer and he can hear as Dean changes positions in bed and makes the box springs squeak. There’s nothing else, nothing to account for the change that Sam feels in the house, and he’s already chastising himself mentally for being an idiot when he hears Dean shift again and then once more. His breathing, now that Sam really listens for it, has gotten faster, is almost hitching now and then.

Dean’s dreaming. Sam’s usually the one to come up screaming, none too delighted to learn that stripping the worst of his memories of Lucifer only paved the way for all of his terrifying memories of the other angel he’d shared a thousand years with, but he hardly has the market cornered on nightmares. They don’t come every night or with any kind of alarming frequency, but settling down and backing off the booze has increased the number of bad dreams his brother has, or at least increased the number of times he wakes up from them, sometimes shouting, sometimes swinging, once or twice even weeping. There’s a good chance that if he wakes him he’ll wind up with a punch to the face, but Sam’s already throwing the covers back and standing before he even decides that he’ll take that over Dean torturing himself with a bottle or two of whiskey for the rest of the day.

He doesn’t have to hold his hands out in front of him like he had a thousand times before as child feeling his way around an unfamiliar dark motel room. They’ve been in their house for almost a year and a half and though the construction projects are ongoing, they’re all mostly external now. Dean laying a new roof in pieces at a time doesn’t affect the inside of the house where things are wide, open, and fixed. He knows how many steps it takes for him to reach the door of the bedroom, how many more will get him across the hall. He knows when he has to turn inside of Dean’s bedroom and trusts that there won’t be anything on the floor, here or in Dean’s room that will cause him to trip. It’s a simple exercise, one of the first he tried when waking blind. He’d counted the steps to the bathroom from his hospital bed the first week he could stand without feeling seriously woozy or like he was going to puke from the endless rounds of drugs and antibiotics. Doctor Milner calls it an adaptation technique, Dean calls it cool, to Sam it’s just a means of independence and a useful skill. He doesn’t use it now.

Sam walks, instinct and familiarity guiding him more than anything. He puts his hand out right when he reaches his doorway, palms the wood trim that Dean tells him is cherry and, now that it’s been sanded and stained, ‘pretty good looking wood, really.’ He doesn’t count the steps across the hall, knows that he’s taking large strides and that it would affect his count anyway. He just goes, drawn to the sound of his brother thrashing in his bed and that of his labored breathing. The air in the other bedroom is heavier and somehow tight as if Dean’s drawing all of the oxygen from the room even though he’s not gasping or crying out, just breathing heavily as if he’s running or being hurt. He makes a broken mewl that Sam hates, that reaches inside of him and pulls on all of his guts so that he feels short of breath himself, heart pounding and feeling like it’s maybe breaking somewhere high in his throat.

He hates this. He hates what the world and all of its unseen horrors have done to them. Maybe he wakes up blind, and bitter because of it, but he knows that this – these nights of tortured dreams would plague his brother, possibly the best person Sam has ever known, regardless. It makes him feel small, makes him feel selfish, and though he has no vision to blur, he feels the hot sting of tears in his eyes anyway. He hates that, too, knows Dean will hate it more, and Sam swallows hard, tells himself to man up a little as he gingerly reaches out to feel for the edge of Dean’s bed.

He doesn’t see Dean coming for him, only has sound and sensation to tell him that his brother’s in motion. There’s no time for Sam to back off. He pushes out as Dean swings, thrusts him back with a palm to the chest, but still catches the graze of Dean’s fist against his cheek. It burns, will probably bruise, but it’s not a full powered punch and Sam knows to take that for a win. He still has to roll, to bend his body backward with the limberness of a reed bent by the wind when Dean’s out of bed, rushing him, and flipping him to the floor. He doesn’t break anything, but Sam feels the wind get knocked out of him as Dean drops down on his midsection, a little too close to his groin for comfort, and pins his arms down. Dean’s snarling a little and Sam has no idea if he’s truly awake or if there’s enough light in his bedroom to allow Dean to see him at all. Sam doesn’t need to see. He can feel exactly where Dean is and it doesn’t take much for him to get his legs around his brother, scissor them, and change the balance of power. Sam’s got his legs tight around Dean, is holding him down as he bends almost in half to reach for his face.

“Dean, wake up, man. C’mon, it’s just me.”

“Sammy…” Dean goes limp beneath him, chest heaving against the push of Sam’s legs, and Sam can hear him drag a hand through his hair before letting it drop to the wood floor.

“You okay?”

“No, you’re practically sitting on me,” Dean answers, voice tight from lack of air and guarded because he no doubt knows Sam will ask him about his dreams. He’s not wrong. “C’mon, get offa me, Sam. You weigh a ton.”

“It’s all muscle,” Sam tells him and unhooks his legs so that he can back off and give them both room to breathe.

“Yeah, yeah. All muscle and you still weigh a ton,” Dean replies. He stands and Sam knows without seeing that Dean’s holding a hand out to him. He takes it, lets Dean pull him up. They stand that way for a second, too close and breathing each other’s air like they’ve done a hundred times before. Sam opens his mouth to ask Dean if he’s okay, to ask what he’s dreaming, but Dean yawns instead. “Jesus, what time… uh…”

The outbound from Chicago can be felt beneath his feet and almost as if on cue, the engineer makes the whistle scream. “Four-seventeen,” Sam says mildly. There were days back in the beginning of his blindness when a simple question about the time or the stray ‘would you look at that’ would put Sam in a mood, but he’s growing accustomed to that, at least.

Dean must glance at his alarm clock because he sounds almost smug when he says “More like four-sixteen, Affleck.”

Sam lets the Daredevil crack slide. “So… was it another dream about hell?”

“Purgatory and nope.”

Sam hears the click as Dean turns on the lamp and the slight intake of breath that indicates he’s seen the red mark on his cheek that will be a bruise in a few hours. He thinks he could maybe use guilt to push Dean along, to get him to open up a little about what he dreamed that was quite so bad, but he doesn’t. He plays along and asks “nope what?” as Dean makes a rustle that sounds like he’s drawing sweatpants on over his underwear.

“Nope, I don’t need to talk about it.  Coffee?”

Sam thinks about sleep and how nice it would be to recapture his own dreams, not bad for once, but even though Dean’s awake, it doesn’t mean that his nightmare won’t linger, won’t color the rest of the day. Sam doesn’t want that, so he nods. “And that breakfast soufflé thing you make.”

“That takes forever,” Dean whines.

Sam just grins. “We’ve got the time.”

“Such a bitch.” Dean takes his arm and leads him. There’s no need for it unless they knocked something on the floor, something that Sam doesn’t expect to find. He supposes that they have, even if it’s only Dean’s blankets. Such a thing could still cause him to get tangled up and fall on his face, so he doesn’t object, doesn’t even mind when Dean leads him out of the room. He’s the only one Sam’s comfortable with leading him around. Something about the way he does it doesn’t make Sam feel like a lost child or, worse, the blind man he is. Maybe it’s just because, in one fashion or another, they’ve been pulling each other along their entire lives.

“Jerk,” Sam replies after a moment and doesn’t mind when smiling makes his bruised cheek ache.

Sam’s holding a softening bag of once frozen peas to his cheek and laughing as Phil the canary sits on the ledge of the open window and tries to out-bitch a pack of finches squabbling and beeping outside. He’s singing his little heart out, has reached top volume despite the off-key wailing of Dean singing along to the radio. It occurs to Sam that maybe Phil isn’t competing with the finches or trying in vain to get their attention so much as he’s trying to drown out Dean.

“We have got to get more than one dish I can bake in,” Dean groans and Sam can hear him at the sink, no doubt scrubbing the glass dish that’s been a catch-all for almost everything they put into the oven that doesn’t come wrapped in plastic and cardboard first.

Sam puts his head down, taking the peas with him, and snorts, earning him a wet and probably sudsy smack to the back of his head.

“No wise cracks, dude. I cook, you eat. And unless you want it to be taco Tuesday seven days a week…”

“No, no,” Sam says raising his head. “I’m not laughing at you, I swear.”

“Yeah, you swear and you lie,” Dean replies. “And if you feel up another frilly apron in Wal-Mart to see if it’ll fit me again, you’re also dead meat.”

“I didn’t know it said ‘kiss the cook.’ Punch the cook would maybe be more our style…”

“Sam…” Dean sits down and there’s no real warning or bite in his tone. He sounds amused, if anything, though Sam catches a strange, not-quite-forlorn tone in his voice when he speaks again. “We’re becoming friggin’ domesticated, aren’t we?”

“Last salt and burn was just to get us into the house,” Sam agrees. “Yeah, I think we probably are. It’s just instead of wives and kids, we have strippers, Danny, and a canary.”

“Danny.” Sam can’t see the grimace on Dean’s face or perhaps the eye-roll, but he knows it’s there from the aggrieved sound Dean makes when he says the name. “What a…”

“Swell guy for giving a blind dude a job at his gym,” Sam finishes for him. “Though, I admit, he could lay off you a little.”

“It’s my hotness, Sam. It’s blinding – no pun – and Danny’s just bitter because I’d rather hang with Wendy’s girls than swallow his meat.”

“You really are a pig, you know that?”

“I’m a bouncer at a strip club, Sam.”

“And that makes you more of a pig?” he asks.

“Nope, it makes me a goddamned knight in shining armor four nights a week,” Dean corrects. “My girls depend on me…”

“I thought they were Wendy’s girls?”

“It’d make a cool movie,” Dean continues. “Bad ass ex-monster hunter turned bouncer at a strip club. Swayze could play me… you know, if he wasn’t dead. You’d be my not-quite-as bad-ass blind sidekick, can throw in a little Zatoichi shit and a lot of feelings. B – “

“If you say Ben Affleck right now, I’ll punch you,” Sam interrupts. He’s laughing, but he holds up the mushy bag of peas menacingly.

Dean laughs, it’s a warm, rich sound that reminds Sam a lot of their father, though the times he remembers John Winchester laughing can probably be counted on his fingers. He doesn’t tell Dean that he sounds like Dad, just smiles and lets it go, riding on the wave of good feeling that’s more than a relief after the rocky and very early start to their day.

Phil stops trilling to the wildlife outside and changes pitch, gearing up to the car alarm sounding call that he makes when the front door opens. Sam waits for the door to open, knows that it’ll be Wendy because she’s the only person who enters their home like she belongs there. Sam supposes she does in a way – she’d been the one trying to offload the house when they’d first arrived in town and started looking for a place to call home. Her ex – the generally volatile wife beater that as far as Sam knows hasn’t set foot in Rafferty since Dean thoroughly cleaned his clock a year ago – had picked up the house for seventeen thousand years back and had puttered around, “fucking shit up and fucking it up hard” for a few years, hoping to rehab the old place and flip it for two or three times what he’d paid for it. As far as Sam knows, Jake Worthy hadn’t done much of anything to improve the house and had only put a serious drain on his and Wendy’s finances with what Wendy called “another in a long list of get rich schemes.”

“Fuck, the girls,” Dean sighs. “I forgot.”

“Wendy and the kids? And forgot what?”

“Wendy, Bubbles and Veronica and I forgot that your appointment was this morning. It’s at nine, right?”

“Nine-thirty and what did you forget you were going to do with a pair of strippers and your boss?”

“Exotic dancers,” Dean corrects, clearly forgetting that he’s been calling the Glass Houses dancers strippers all morning. “And I’m not saying at the risk of sounding… uh…”

“Like a pervert?” Sam asks.

“Like someone who needs a frilly kiss the cook apron,” Dean adds reluctantly.

Sam grins and pushes his chair back as he hears the door open. Phil lets loose with another warbling screech that sounds like it needs to come with a mechanical voice commanding “please step away from the vehicle.” The sound of small wings in the air reaches his ears and Sam whistles, hopefully cajoling Phil his way instead of towards the open front door. He hasn’t yet tried to make a jailbreak when they’ve let him out to fly around the house and Sam doubts he’d really do it, convinced as he is that Phil’s too domesticated and just a chicken, but the thought worries him nonetheless. He’s relieved when he feels the tiny dig of the canary’s talons in his shoulder and the gentle scrape of his soft wings against his cheek.

“Hey, buddy,” Sam sings at him and earns a groan from Dean.

“You and that bird, man.”

“You bought him,” Sam reminds him and cranes his head towards the sound of footsteps on the floor. “Wendy? Why’s Dean afraid to tell me what you’re up to this morning?”

“Because he thinks you’ll call him a pussy if you know he’s taking Georgie, Veronica and me garage sailing,” Wendy answers from the door into the kitchen.

Sam barks out a laugh that makes Phil flap his wings a few times and he can hear Dean groan again in dismay at being outed. Wendy cackles a bit and then fills Sam’s senses as she leans down in a wave of oriental flowers and musk to press a quick kiss to the top of his head.

“Morning, Sam,” she says and then must reach over to stroke Phil once because Sam can feel the bird puff out his chest and vibrate a little as he coos at her like a love struck pigeon.

Georgie – Bubbles at the strip club and Georgia Tremont most everywhere else – and Veronica come at him after that, smelling like a heady mix of bubblegum, wildflowers, and sin. Veronica, subtle as a wrecking ball, all but pushes her large, very firm, and surely fake breasts into his face as she bends down to tickle Phil and tell him what a pretty, pretty bird he is like Phil’s some kind of talking mimic who can agree with her. Phil sucks up the attention like the whoring Casanova he is and Sam’s wondering how he can gracefully get Veronica’s boobs out of his face when Georgie coughs a little.

“Uh, Veronica, let the man breathe. No need to make your killer body a literal description.”

“Aw,” Veronica says as she rides Sam’s thigh for a half second before backing off, “I think I made Georgie jealous.” Veronica’s loud and brash, comes off like bimbo from Planet Ten, and Sam knows that before he and Dean came to town that she’d shoved a shotgun in Jake Worthy’s face the night he’d almost beaten Wendy to death in front of their two children. She’s not exactly the stripper with the heart of gold cliché, but Sam thinks she probably would have pulled the trigger if pushed and that she’d do it again if anyone came at one of her friends.

Georgia is another matter entirely. To Sam she sounds and smells like a good girl, the sort of girl that belongs in a graduate program at some university instead of stripping down to a g-string every night. She’s the source of the fresh, wildflower smell that tickles Sam’s nose and makes his skin itch a little with want and when she speaks, it’s always in a soft, but very concise voice like she’s spent a few years in a classroom, teaching undergrads or presenting papers. Sam knows she’s a bombshell, Dean’s described her down to the mole on the left cheek of her ass, and he knows too that all of the cash she pulls out of her panties every night at the club goes to pay for her ailing mother’s medical bills. Georgia really is the heart of gold stripper, but somehow she’s so quiet, sounds so mousy and shy to him that it never comes off as a cliché or an affectation.

She doesn’t lean in to kiss him or rub against him as Wendy and then Veronica had, just takes a seat next to him and then utters out a little gasp. Her fingers touch the scruff of his cheek and Sam’s almost forgotten about the bruise he’s been nursing all morning until he feels the gentle scrape of her nails against his four day beard.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Well,” Sam turns towards Dean, now Dean and Wendy because he’s heard the scrape of the fourth chair and can hear Wendy clinking the coffee pot against a cup she must have pulled from the mug tree in the middle of the table. He doesn’t know what to say and he makes a helpless expression in Dean’s direction, waiting for him to spin the tale that they’ll both have to live with and keep on lying until the bruise fades. Dean, as always, makes it easy on him.

He doesn’t know if Dean shrugs, but something in his voice makes it easy for Sam to imagine that he has. “Sammy’s like a blind fucking ninja, Georgie. It was late and he crept up on me. I, er, accidentally punched him.”

“Does it hurt?” Georgie asks, fingers touching his cheek a final time before she pulls it away with an embarrassed little sound.

“It’s not so bad,” Sam tells her.

He can hear a smack from across the table and Dean cries out “hey!” simultaneous with Wendy’s pronouncement that he’s a big, stupid ass.

“He scared the shit out of me,” Dean complains and Sam says nothing, though he thinks that it’s probably true and wonders again if it’s better to let Dean sleep through his dreams or continue to wake him before they get so bad.

“Then turn on a light next time,” Wendy tells him. “He doesn’t need it, but you do if you’re going to smack everyone that tip-toes up on you. I pay you to use your fists against guys trying to manhandle my girls, not deck your blind brother, dumb ass.”

“I don’t mind a little man-handling,” Veronica drawls from somewhere by the kitchen sink. Sam doesn’t need to see to know that she’s given Dean or possibly all of them a lewd grin.

“Pft,” Wendy snorts. “You’re half the reason I need a bouncer, Ronnie. Lap dances don’t include letting guys think you’re going to let them suck on your nipples and then leaving them hard when you walk away with all of their cash.”

“Sure they do. And, hey, I’m not the reason Dean’s been breaking noses this week,” Veronica says and Sam can feel Georgia flinch next to him. “It’s all about Bubbles the librarian lately.”

“Bu-Georgie?” Sam asks, correcting himself before he can address her by her stripper persona, something he knows she’d take gracefully, even if he thinks she hates it.

“There’s a new club in DeWitt,” Georgie tells him quietly. “It’s almost a hundred miles away, but it’s a big club and they serve the hard stuff, not just beer and soda. We’ve lost some business to them and needed to get it back. Carmen and I came up with something a little more titillating than our usual routines. It’s been something of a success, really, but it makes the men, erm, somewhat excitable.”

“Georgie? I love you so much for actually describing a lesbian S&M stripper routine as titillating that I don’t have the words,” Dean tells her. “Even if it has been a pain in my ass since you started letting Carmen tie you up and dry hump you on stage.”

Sam winces, even as his dick betrays him and does a little ‘hello thar!’ number in his pants. He doesn’t know how Georgie is on stage, he’s never been to Wendy’s club, hasn’t ever found a reason to go to a strip club when he can’t see even though Wendy promises him that drinks are always free for the Winslow boys – their assumed name – and Veronica has sworn to give him the lap dance of his life, something she assures him on many occasions he doesn’t need to see to enjoy. He does know that Georgia is reserved when she’s not on the clock and that it must take a lot for her to get on stage and allow herself to be tied up in front of a pack of leering men. He can also imagine her doing the prim little librarian routine to Carmen, who Sam thinks of in all angles. Her hipbones he’s pretty sure can cut and he knows she’s pierced everywhere, and that it costs a pretty penny to see all of her piercings. Sam doesn’t know if she’s really a lesbian, he doesn’t think so, but in a town like Rafferty she probably fits the perceived image of one easily enough. He can almost see her bending Georgie back over some prop on stage and though his dick is telling him that it likes this mental image and wants him to run with it, it makes Sam a little sad. Mimicking sex acts on stage feels more exploitive than shaking her ass for ones and fives. Knowing that it was Georgie and Carmen’s idea, probably mostly Georgie’s, means that no one’s really exploiting her, unless it’s Georgie herself.

Sam wishes he and Dean were filthy rich, that they hadn’t blown all of the cash they’d raked in from the last few Leviathan hunts before Sam went blind. He’d give it all to Georgie now, even though she’d refuse and tell him “thank you, no, but I’m getting by just fine, I’m sure.”

“That, uh, must be something,” Sam says finally when he thinks the silence has stretched on too long.

“Oh, it’s pretty raunchy,” Georgie assures him, “but Carmen’s conscientious enough to always brush her teeth before the act and the money has been something of a blessing. We’ve done well enough that Wendy thinks we might be able to drop the early shows on Wednesday and Thursday… if we don’t get closed down for lewd behavior, that is.”

“Strip club,” Dean snorts from across the table. “Lewd’s just part of the business and the righteous chicks from the First Street Church can stuff it. I know they all have copies of Magic Mike hidden away in their DVD cabinet, the skeevy old broads. Look, girls, stay here and drink Sam’s foofoo coffee for a bit. I have to drive him to his appointment – you okay getting from Milner’s to the gym, Sammy?”

Veronica swears a little from her place by the sink, calls Dean a few choice names for abandoning him to the streets, but Sam nods. He knows she doesn’t get it, that Wendy, Georgia, Danny, and half of Rafferty doesn’t get it, but Dean does and Sam’s grateful for that. He knows Sam needs to do things on his own, even if he doesn’t always do it in the smartest fashion and he knows again that Dean will bust him back to prepubescence if he hears again that Sam crossed the street without his cane or on someone’s arm. But, Dean will continually let him have as much independence as he can because he knows Sam needs it.

“I know it’s kind of early,” Dean says hesitantly. They’re in the car, idling at the curb in front of the small building that used to be a flower shop, but serves as an office for Milner and Critchfield, MD. “Look, I’ll call the girls and we’ll do their thing another day.”

“We’re already here,” Sam tells him, “and it’s only a half an hour early. I have my book,” he says fingering the heavy Braille copy of ‘The Complete Sherlock Holmes.’ “Anyway, by the time we get back to the house, it’d be time to turn around and come back – what’s the point?”

“We could go to the grain and feed place to pick up Phil’s bird chow and see if the little seed tree things you ordered for him came in…”

“Dean.” Sam reaches over and grabs his arm, giving it a light squeeze. It’s strange how he never mishandles Dean, how he never accidentally gropes him, but seems to know exactly where he is, how he’s sitting lack of sight be damned. “Dude, I’m fine, really. Go do your thing with Wendy and the girls.”

“It’s their thing,” Dean assures him, “and it’s not like all the good stuff won’t already be picked over by the time we head out.”

“Georgia told me people in town try to unload the crappy stuff for the early birds because they’re always the penny pinchers. It’s the late morning crowd that’s willing to pay for the good stuff. I think you’ll still do all right. What are you looking for anyway?”

“Thought I’d see if anyone has any good records out,” Dean replies, no doubt thinking of his beloved stereo and honest-to-God turn table with more than the required amount of affection. “Maybe see if I can find us some decent pans and bakeware. I’m tired of trying to cram everything into that five dollar casserole dish we picked up at Wal-Mart. Something…” he breaks off with a wry, choked sounding laugh and Sam can’t help but grin at him hugely.

“I knew it was your idea!” he crows. “Yeah, you’re the bad ass all right, bargain hunting at garage sales. You don’t need Patrick Swayze to play you in a movie. It should be more like Seth Rogan or maybe the tall guy from ‘How I Met Your Mother.’”

“I hate you so much,” Dean tells him.

“No you don’t.” Sam gives his arm a final squeeze and opens the door, taking his book and gym bag with him. He bends down and leans in the window for a moment. “Think you’ll be done looking at carnival glass and hand-made doilies in time to pick me up from work at five or you and the girls planning on driving to Freemont to hit the flea markets and antique shops, too? I mean, I know shopping garage sales is serious business and I can call a cab if…”

“Get off my car, bitch,” Dean tells him. There’s no heat or annoyance there, just warmth and the put upon sigh that Dean does so well.

“I want one of those glass chickens that opens up so you can put butter or candies in it,” Sam tells him.

“I will run over your feet, Sam.”

“And maybe a really ugly clown painting now that it doesn’t bother me since I can’t see it. Ooh, Elvis on black velvet. Can we have a velvet Elvis, Dean? Can we?”

“And I’m leaving,” Dean groans and makes the Impala rev a little bit.

Sam chuckles at him and backs up a step. He waves and turns, ready to start counting the seven steps that he knows it takes to get from the curb to the office. He knows Dean’s parked directly across from the door, he thinks Dean would drive around the block eight or nine times if he had to just to get Sam to a place where he can easily get from the car to the doctors’ office.

“Hey, Sammy? Five o’clock. I’ll be there,” Dean calls from the Impala.

Sam waves again and grins because he knows Dean will be there, that Dean’s always there when he needs him to be and, if he hasn’t always been, well that’s Sam’s fault as much as anyone’s.

He counts steps methodically, listening always for the sound of someone else coming down the sidewalk. There isn’t anyone. Rafferty is like a lot of little towns – most of the action has moved out to Wal-Mart and tiny strip mall on the edge of town. Downtown isn’t exactly deserted, but with kids in school and the community college in full swing, there’s not a lot of foot traffic just yet. It’s busier on the weekends, though he can hear a few cars idling at the bank drive through nearby because it’s Friday and there’s still a few people left in the world that deposit checks or cash them out instead of relying on automatic banking. Sam doesn’t complain – he and Dean are two of those people, though neither of them gets paid until the following week.

Mark the receptionist is just unlocking the doors to the offices when Sam reaches the door. He holds the door open for Sam with a garbled “g’morning, Sham.” It sounds like he has something held in his teeth while he rattles the keys out of the lock. Sam smells chocolate and sugary maple and grins a little as he walks past Mark, counting his steps, smaller now inside of the office, carefully.

“Another donut breakfast, Mark? You’re gonna have to come see me at the gym if you keep that up.” It’s a guess, of course, the sweet smell might not be a donut at all, but he hears Mark pull the thing from his mouth and it isn’t hard to detect the note of awe in his voice.

“How do you _do_ that?”

Sam taps his nose and finds the waiting area on the fourth step. Feeling behind him for the chairs, he sets down his gym bag in one and sits in the one next to it. “I can smell it.”

“You’re like that Affleck guy from the movie where he played the blind super hero,” Mark tells him and Sam represses a groan and shakes his head when Mark offers him coffee. He’s been up since four – one more coffee in his day and Sam figures he’ll be in orbit.

“I think he had sonar,” he tells Mark and gets out his book.

“Which is basically super hearing,” Mark replies and sits down at his desk. Sam doesn’t disagree, though he figures he could probably pass the time by geeking out over the difference between sonar and acute hearing and probably bullshitting about superheroes, too, but he’s content enough to let Mark noisily smack his lips around his donut while absently clacking the keys on his computer.

He takes in the office while absently running his fingers over the title of his book. It feels huge and over-sized, like a movie script typed out in code on heavy paper. He feels the bumps, marvels still that he can make sense of them, that he no longer has to labor over one letter at a time, but can read confidently with his fingers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s so easy now that he doesn’t think he’ll ever get over being surprised by it. Learning Braille had been learning another language, one comprised of tactile sensation and Sam, so dependent upon his eyes to differentiate between shapes when learning other written languages, didn’t think he’d ever accomplish it. He knows it’s not as widely used as he thought it would be, that something like ten percent or less of blind adults in the country can actually read it, but Sam struggled with it, refusing to give up on the written word, which has been his constant companion since Dean taught him to read as a very small child. He knows he’s never going to research again – which is fine so long as they continue to stay out of the hunting world – but even with the vast amounts of audio books available, there’s something about reading, about locking himself away where he doesn’t have to listen and can silently lose himself in the someone else’s imagination and story was too important to lose.

He doesn’t open his book right away, despite his earlier instance to Dean that it’s all he needs to keep himself entertained for the half hour he has to wait on his appointment. Sam just reads the title and all of the cover information over and over again, enjoying the feel of it and how it actually makes sense to him, while he tries to isolate the differences in the office. He can smell potting soil, it’s strong, almost heady and he supposes that Milner or Critchfield have added a few plants, maybe some trees to the office. The fans are spinning overhead, dutifully moving the air because the old flower shop design of the building doesn’t allow for much in the way of open windows. The offices have storefront glass and Sam wonders if Mark’s desk and the reception area had once been full of plants, flower cases, or endless pots of roses, lilies, and daisies.

There’s still an old, lingering sweetness to the air, something like an old soda shop smell and Sam can almost imagine an ice cream counter in the middle of the flower shop. He remembers a few places like that in small towns when he and Dean had been kids – shops that claimed to be flower shops and drug stores, but also sported little metal tables where kids and teenagers hung out with milkshakes, sodas, and two scoops of ice cream on waffle cones. They’d all been in small towns like Rafferty, places that had town squares with a courthouse or some kind of town office in the middle of the square, though some in towns too small to be the county seat had sported tiny parks with statues of town founders or old canons from various American wars. He knows Rafferty isn’t the county seat- Freemont has that honor – and he wonders what’s in the center of the town square. He’s never asked Dean, never asked anyone. It’s strange to think that he’s downtown at the gym or Doctor Milner’s office so often and he’s never once thought to ask what else is around him. It’s strange, even after two years, that he has to ask if he wants to know.

The realization makes him feel kind of glum and reminds him of why he continues to go to therapy – some things still bother him about being blind. He’s starting to wonder if they’ll bother him forever.

Doctor Milner comes to find him almost the full half hour later. Sam’s not too perturbed by it, he was early after all, and once he’d started to actually read his book, he was sufficiently entertained. He’d pored through Holmes as child and he has to admit that he enjoys reading them again. It’s almost like visiting an old friend – a brilliant, oftentimes chilly old friend.

“Sam,” Doctor Milner calls from the doorway of her office. “Good to see you, come on back.”

Sam closes his book and grabs his gym bag, momentarily caught off guard, if not a little pleased that the doctor doesn’t come to collect him as she usually does. He knows he’s her only blind patient, that she sees a lot of people for various other mental illnesses and coping problems, though he supposes that there’s other patients with various handicaps that she treats for their depression over their condition. That’s what he’s here for, what he’d agreed to after the third week of lying in his bed and doing nothing because he’d felt useless. Despite learning how to count steps before he’d left the hospital and just haltingly learning Braille when he and Dean moved to Rafferty, after dealing with the ghost that inhabited their house – and he knows that Dean did all of the work on that front, from research to grave digging – for weeks he’d stayed in bed, getting up to eat and pee and not much else. In frustration, Dean had found the nearest Center for the Blind in Freemont and had unceremoniously dropped him off. Sam had worked on his then blooming reading skills, had sat with black unsweetened coffee because he didn’t know what was sugar, what was sweetener, or if there was even creamer, and it was only after his third lonely trip to the center that he’d started meeting people, one of them the hardcore ‘blind people rule!’ Charles Yancey, who’d told him in no uncertain terms that he was fucked up and not dealing with it. Yancey’s hardcore, the absolute Chuck Norris of the blind, and Sam admits that he can only take him in small doses. But, he’d pointed Sam in Doctor Milner’s direction when Sam had refused counseling at the Center for the Blind and Sam can’t help but be grateful to him for that.

Sam counts steps, as always, to the back office that Beth Milner works out of. It’s eleven steps, all of them uninterrupted and without obstacles, though as he reaches the ninth step, the smell of potting soil grows stronger. He reaches out, feels something bushy and soft like the Norfolk pine that sits by the sliding glass door to the backyard at home and dodges a half step to his right.

“New tree?” he asks as he reaches the door of her office and holds out his free hand.

She shakes it and gives him a little tug before letting go, indicating that he can come into her office. “Mmm, you’d mentioned the one you and Dean have at home a few times. I was in the greenhouse in DeWitt with my daughter this weekend – she’s not liking the mums they have at Wal-Mart this year. I saw the tree and finally realized what you were talking about. I fell in love with it.”

“Seems pretty good sized,” Sam tells her. “How much did you pay for it?”

“Ninety-nine plus tax,” she says and Sam can almost hear the wince she must make when she tells him.

“Wow. Business is good?”

“Sadly, yes. C’mon in. Coffee?”

“Er, no. I’ve had my quota a few times over today, thanks.”

“Bad night?” she asks and that’s one of the things he likes about her, she just gets right to it, even though he’s just coming through the door.

“Not really…”

“Except you got punched out, from the looks of it,” she interrupts.

Sam touches his cheek, having almost forgotten about it because it’s pretty much nothing compared to the kinds of things he’s endured in the past. “Uh, yeah. I guess I’m a little quiet these days, a little too good at moving around in the dark because I scared the holy crap out of Dean.”

“Is Dean’s first reaction always to start punching when he’s startled?”

“What? No, of course not.” _Yeah, probably it is, really, but you really can’t blame the guy._  Sam opens his mouth to tell her something else, but fumbles as he catches something soft with his knee. It’s a chair, not one of the roomy wingback chairs that face each other in front of Doctor Milner’s desk, but something smaller, almost like a child’s chair.

“Oh, sorry, I picked up a few other things while I was shopping in DeWitt. There’s a little area with less intimidating chairs for my younger patients.”

Sam nods and reshoulders his gym bag as he steps around the new seating area and runs into what feels like another tree – this one a ficus that he thought he remembers Doctor Milner saying was in the corner of her office when she’d described the room to him on their first meeting. He nearly knocks it over and drops his book. When Sam reaches down to pick it up, his bag slips off his shoulders and he has to reach behind him to pick it up.

He’s disoriented after that, isn’t sure if he’s facing the office or the door leading out of it and has to reorient himself by reaching out like the goddamned blind man he is to feel for the tree. Doctor Milner doesn’t say anything, is most likely being polite instead of drawing attention to his mishaps, and Sam almost wishes that she’d say something so he could get to a chair and sit down before knocking something else over. He steps around the tree, heading towards where he knows her desk to be and almost swears when she finally calls out to him.

“Over here, Sam,” her voice is soft, cool and mostly professional except for the tiny note of sad concern in it.

She’s not in front of him, like he expects, but off to his left. He turns, one hand all but clutching the book to his chest while he feels the air in front of him almost timidly with the other one. He’s sweating, knows  from the heat he feels in his cheeks that he’s gone beet red and he’s not sure if it’s from frustration, anger, or something worse like maybe a little twinge of fear. He’s become reliant on pattern, on things being fixed, he knows it as much as he knows that nothing’s ever permanently fixed, not even in their house which Dean tries to keep as much the same from day to day as possible.

Sam can’t help but utter a sigh of relief when he feels the tall back of the chair. He still creeps around it carefully, not sure if there’s still a table between the two chairs or if it’s been moved too. He finds it in front and sidles carefully between it and the chair before sitting down. He lets his gym bag drop to the floor next to him and reaches over to carefully lay his book on top of it.

“Wow,” he says with forced cheer, “you really rearranged.”

“New furniture, new art on the walls, it seems like it called for a new arrangement.”

“You could have told me,” he utters before he can stop himself.

He hears Doctor Milner settle into the chair next to him, can hear the silken slide of one stocking clad leg crossing over the other and he’s stopped wondering what her legs looked like after Dean mentioned that they were ‘decent’ and he decided that it was kind of a sleazy thing to wonder about his psychiatrist.

“I thought about telling you, Sam,” she says and she does sound a little chagrined at least, “I really did, but then I thought about something you told me on the first day you came to see me.”

“Umm, I’m guessing it was something about liking open floor plans?”

She laughs, it’s a rich, honey and whiskey sort of laugh that reminds him sharply, almost painfully of Ellen for a moment. “No, though I think I understand why you would. When you came in, we talked about a lot of things – Charles Yancey and why you refused to attend counseling sessions at the Center of the Blind, even though they have more experience with your unique needs than I did.”

“I hope I didn’t cause much need for studying on your part.”

“Oh, you did,” she says mildly, “but that’s always something I’ve enjoyed. Back on topic,” and, a lot like Ellen again, Beth Milner never lets him redirect a conversation away from where it needs to be, “you told me that you felt Charles was too, how did you put it? Militant. I think you called him the blind equivalent of an out and proud guy, the sort that wants to march in every parade and carry signs instead of just living life without being bothered.”

Sam resists the urge to fidget. He knows it’s natural, knows that therapy involves being uncomfortable while dealing with shit you’d rather lock away in a chest and bury, and he doesn’t think Doctor Milner would think badly of him at all for it. But, she’d notice it because it’s her job and judging from the fact that Sam went from being practically a shut-in to someone that has a job he likes and things he enjoys doing, he has to admit that she’s good at it. Well, her and Dean – who it seems refuses to give up on him, not even when Sam had given up on himself.

“Well,” he says finally, “what’s so wrong about that? I’m not a cause, Doctor, I’m just blind.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it at all. I’d probably be worried if you did try approach things like Charles because you’re not like him, you don’t think or respond to things the same way he does. But, there’s nothing wrong with his way either.”

“I’m not following you,” Sam says with a slight twirl of his hand that means hurry it along, one he uses on Dean and that he supposes might seem a little rude. “I got a face full of ficus because I need to accept Yancey’s world view?”

“Another topic for another day,” she replies, not sounding offended at all. “You told me at that first session that you didn’t like Charles because he was in your face, that he was a nag, as you put it, about all of the things you should be doing to get by as independently as possible, do you remember?”

Sam sits back. “I remember. He was on me about learning Braille, which I’m practically freaking fluent in now and which most people can’t read at all.  He was hell bent on teaching me stuff I’d figured out for myself like folding my money, marking my clothes, pairing my socks before I washed them. He even wanted to reprogram my cell for voice command when Dean and I figured that out before I even left the hospital.”

“He was trying to help.”

“I know. I know and he did, it’s just… okay. Patty O’Reilly uses a dog. He’s smart, he can even sniff out which packets are sweetener and which are sugar because she’s diabetic on top of being blind… or blind because she’s diabetic? Anyway, it’s important and the dog works for her. Yancey tells me to think about a dog, even though they’re not as widely used as TV makes it seem. I like dogs, but I don’t know how to treat one like a guy at a job and not a pet. It wouldn’t work for me. Fine, he says, and gives me a cane – like I didn’t get one free from the hospital before I checked out blind as a bat – and tells me I can attend classes on how to use a friggin’ stick any weekend I want. Or I can join this buddy system network and pal around with a bunch of people I don’t know for hours in some kind of old people’s bus for the blind so we can do our shopping and bond over fun activities for the blind and, you know? No. Thank you, but no. I have a life. I have my brother, I have friends, I don’t need to change everything around and hang out with entirely new people that don’t know shit about me and what I’ve been through just because I can’t see.”

Sam huffs out a little breath after that, almost shocked because that came out from almost nowhere. He can hear Doctor Milner shift and she’s silent like she’s studying him and for a moment he’s almost driven mad by the simple fact that he can’t look back at her and gauge what she’s thinking.

“Feel better?”

“A little lighter,” Sam admits, “but I don’t know if I feel any better or what this has got to do with the damned tree or anything else.”

“Sam, everything Charles was trying to offer you, unnecessary or not, was like you said – something to help you. You mentioned the cane to me that first visit and several times afterwards. I know you have it – in your bag, I’m guessing?”

Sam gets where she’s going with this and he feels a little slow and twice as sullen because of it. “Yes,” he says tightly. “With the spare Yancey gave me in the hall closet.”

“When was the last time you used it?”

“The hall closet? This morning.”

“Your brother attending the session today?” she asks lightly. “Because I think I hear him in the room just now.”

“What can I say? He rubs off on you.”

“I have no doubt about that,” she says a little archly. “When was the last time you used your cane, Sam?”

He knew it was coming to this, but it doesn’t make him feel any less caught out. “In the hospital. One of the volunteers was blind and he showed me how to use it because the girl in occupational therapy was clueless.”

“Did it make sense to you? When he taught you how to use it, how to sound things out, feel for objects and people around you, did it make sense?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he even showed me… taught me, rather,” and stumbling over a word associated with vision is a throwback to an earlier state, he knows, “how to use it in coordination with step counting. Guy was a pro. He said there’s always stuff in the way in a hospital, but with his cane and the Braille on the signs around the place, he gets by without tripping up or tripping anyone else up.”

“Then why…”

He rubs a hand across his face. Feels a slippery sheen of sweat from his earlier panic over finding a familiar room suddenly unfamiliar and wipes his palm across his jeans to dry it. “I don’t know. Honestly, I get it – the world isn’t blind and isn’t set up for my convenience. I know that, Doctor Milner.”

“But you resist the cane. You don’t like people lending you a hand, which I think is part pride and part maybe something else we should talk about when we’re over a few other more immediate hurdles because I think we both know you’ve got a few post traumatic issues to deal with –“

_Oh, boy. You have no idea how right you are on that score, Doctor._

“ – but as much as you want, as much as you need to be as independent as possible, you keep resisting a few things that would really help you out. Why do you think that is?”

“Why do _you_ think that is?”

“Sam…”

“I know, I know. Redirecting and deflecting. I’m sorry. I… I guess I don’t want to be treated differently. I don’t want people going out of their way for me. I don’t want to be that guy that’s treated like he’s broken because of one little thing.”

“You’re not broken,” Doctor Milner says firmly. “In a lot of ways, you’re so much further away from broken than other people dealing with new handicaps that it’s kind of spooky, but Sam… you _are_ that guy. You _do_ have a handicap and as good as you are at adapting, you have a long way to go when it comes to coping.”

 _Yeah, but in my life? Adapting is as close to coping as it ever gets._ He doesn’t say it, not at first, because he knows Doctor Milner has no frame of reference for the experiences he and Dean have been through or how she could possibly relate to a lifetime of sucking up each new hurt and horrible thing as quickly as possible because the next nightmare has always been right around the corner.

She doesn’t say anything for a moment and when Sam still doesn’t have anything to say, she reaches out and touches his knee lightly. “Okay in there?”

“Yeah,” Sam says finally. “I guess I was just thinking that adapting has been coping for me and for Dean for a long time.  We’ve always had to roll with the punches, I suppose. It’s… weird. But, we’ve settled down, we’re not – “ _Chasing monsters, running from angels and demons, you know, the usual._ “We don’t have to do the kinds of things we were trained for any more.” It’s an intentional deception, letting it sound like they led some kind of military existence, though he supposes Milner could just as easily think they were criminals or were raised in some kind of gun-toting fringe society – which is closer to the truth than anything. 

“My whole life, I think, I’ve worked on Dean, trying to get him to tell me how he’s feeling and just talk about stuff. I guess it’s funny – sad maybe – that I suck so much at dealing with things myself.”

“It’s always much easier to talk to other people about their problems than it is to deal with you own, believe me.”

Sam cocks his head at her. “A few ghosts in your past, Doctor Milner?”

“Oh, you have no idea, Sam. Just no idea at all.” She’s Ellen all over again, so much so that Sam almost comments on it, but is spared the heartache when Doctor Milner admonishes him again to use the cane before he “falls in a hole in the street” and then moves on to another thorny subject – dating.

Sam nearly gets creamed by a pack of teenagers on ten-speeds. He has a few seconds to hear the sound of them approaching, to note that it's unique, different than the sound of mountain bikes – which is what he thought everyone had switched to in the last fifteen years – and then they're upon him. He left the office swearing he’d do better about using his cane, but the walk from Doctor Milner’s office to the gym is only a few blocks of storefront and he didn’t even bother fishing it out of his bag. Usually, he's safe enough to walk close to the shops, sometimes with his hand trailing along the glass, around tables by the coffee shop, over Carrie Ventura's faintly funky smelling dreads if she's out holding court with the over-caffeinated scene like she usually is most days, trailing over the tops of the prickly holly bushes in front of the Jesus Saves bookshop, and then another few feet of glass to the gym. It's not a guaranteed route by any means. Sometimes there are kids running ahead of harried mothers, sometimes ice, snow, dog crap, once a box of sleeping kittens which he'd nearly smashed and had almost taken home out of sheer guilt.

He hears the sound of the bikes approaching, smells sweat, cheap hipster cologne, and something that's just too hard to describe, something he can only think of as young – then they're there, swerving around him at the last minute with a couple calls of "oh shit!" and "watch it, asshole!" and one "holy moly!" which Sam thinks is kind of endearing, even though something scrapes his arm and stings like a motherfucker. The kids have ridden around him, he's parted them like the Red Sea just by standing there, and though he can hear the Ventura woman snarling after them like they just flung bags of shit at him, Sam's more or less unharmed.

He wavers uncertainly on his feet, smiles in what he believes is the general direction of Carrie and her coffee klatch to indicate that all is well and drifts closer to the shop front windows until he feels the cool glass beneath his fingertips. Sam considers the sting in his arm, probes it a bit with his fingers and sighs when they come away wet. He's got another wound to go with his bruise, one that will need cleaning up – probably nothing more than some Neosporin and a band-aid, really, but it's frustrating to know that he'll need help if he wants to get the blood off instead of smeared on his arm, his clothes, or half of everything and everyone he touches until it dries. He supposes that there’s a parallel in there somewhere between what he’d spent the morning discussing in therapy and the cut he’ll need help with, but Sam’s too frustrated to deal with another object lesson at this moment.

He has a half-second of grumpy old man where he thinks – _damn kids should be in school, not riding bikes on the sidewalk!_ – but it's gone as soon as he thinks it, replaced Doctor Milner’s gentle admonishments and his own admission that he knows the world isn’t expected to cater to him just because he’s blind.

His watch chirps at him, tells him that it’s ten-fifty and Sam swears a little. He’ll make the gym on time, but dressing out and taking care of his arm will make him hit the floor a little late. He teaches a cycling class at noon, but answers phones and now registers new memberships until then since Danny went out of his way to get adapted software that Sam can use on the computer. He doesn’t want to get paid to hang around in the back and drink Vitamin Water since Danny was good enough, not only to give him a job when he had no experience, but also one serious handicap to work around – one Danny’s been great at dealing with.

It’s only a few more minutes to the gym, but he plans on hurrying. It would be a great time to get the cane out if he’s going to power on down the sidewalk, but he doesn’t. Sam knows it’s stupid, but he doesn’t. He hurries along the shops, hand trailing along the glass, and as he goes, he absently wonders if he’s not leaving a bloody smear in his wake. Why that doesn’t bother him, but a cane, helping hands, and rides from people he supposes are his friends does – he just can’t say.

Sam shuts off his phone and steps backwards carefully until he feels the metal bench behind his legs. He turns and runs his hands along the cool metal, feeling for anything he might sit in that he’d wished he hadn’t, and sits when he doesn’t find anything. He’s still in his gym clothes, hoodie zipped up tight to ward off the chill of the early autumn, and he thinks again that maybe he should just suck it up and start showering at the gym. He doesn’t have to see to know that he’s got nothing to be ashamed of naked in a room full of guys, but he also doesn’t want to risk accidentally copping a feel because he has to feel his way around. Or, worse, have someone lead him blind and naked back to his locker.

Doctor Milner’s constantly talking to him about the concessions he has to make since he’s blind and, as far as Sam’s concerned, showering alone in his own home is going to be one of them, the chill of fall and winter be damned. No chance he might bump into anyone at home unless Phil’s out for a joyride and Sam’s pretty sure that the canary isn’t going to care if he somehow hits him with his junk.

He hears the sound of footsteps approaching the other side of the gym door, there’s the rattle of keys, and then a wafting of warmer air as the door opens. Sam can smell Zest and Head and Shoulders along with a liberal helping of expensive smelling cologne. Danny. Sam turns his head, smiles in the direction of the sounds he hears and shakes his head in anticipation before Danny even opens his mouth.

“Nope, don’t say it. I already called a cab.”

“I thought your brother was supposed to pick you up?” Danny’s tone isn’t subtle and isn’t short on the accusation. Sam’s pretty sure Danny thinks he’s some kind of genius saint and that Dean’s the ne’er do well, slacker brother that isn’t there for him. It isn’t true, any of it, not by a long shot, but he also knows that Danny’s got a thing about family. His dad left when he was a kid, mom developed a spectacular coke habit back when it was all the rage in the 80s, and he’s pretty much fended for himself since the day his older sister tucked tail and ran from the family drama. He’s a good guy, but a little sensitive and preachy when it comes to familial responsibility. Sometimes Sam just wants to tell him “hey, guy went to hell for me, not a lot more that you can ask for in a brother,” but, of course, he can’t. So, he endures a lot of Danny’s disapproval, defends Dean when he needs to, and reminds Danny as gently as possible that he’s just blind – not helpless.

“It’s Friday night, Danny. You know the club is a madhouse on Fridays. Anyway, Dean was set to pick me up before he went to work, but I stayed late to help you with the new weight loss group since Marci bailed.” He feels like he needs to point out that Dean had brought him dinner, that he’d even gone to Panera which he sneeringly refers to as the chick’s Subway. But, Danny had dinner with him, so it’s not like he doesn’t know.

“Wendy likes you, she’d have given him a half hour to drive you home if he’d just asked. But that might mean leaving his freaking fan club to fend for themselves for a while, too. Like getting ones and fives out of a g-string requires that much help.”

“Danny, I can get myself home. I’m blind, not helpless or a child. Dean doesn’t always like it, you know, but he respects it. You could try to do the same.”

Sam knows instantly that Danny’s offended by the statement. Sam can hear him shift, can sense somehow a change in the air as his friend stiffens. He has no real way to explain how he knows these things when someone isn’t sitting right next to him where he might physically feel a change in body posture. Sam sometimes thinks that there are unseen eddies of energy going around and through everything, everyone and when those currents are disrupted, he knows. He doesn’t know how or why, lets Dean chalk it up the heightened senses of blind man and secretly hopes that’s all it is.

He reaches out and catches Danny’s hand. He was aiming for his sleeve and feels a little uncomfortable with the intimacy of grabbing the other man’s hand, but he doesn’t risk further offending Danny by letting go.

“I appreciate your concern, Danny. I really do. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.” _How’s that, Doctor Milner? Am I making progress with my acceptance skills yet?_ “You really took a chance on hiring me, what with not having any experience and being blind – you even changed the computer system around just for me. You’ve been great, Danny. Really, so please don’t feel like I’m being a dick, okay?”

“Oh, hell, Sam,” Danny says squeezing his hand. “You increased business by twenty-five percent the first day you got into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt with the gym logo. I could have paid you to stand around and smile and I still would have made a killing.”

“But, I don’t just stand around. I work and get to teach and... and I help people. That means a lot to me. I can’t tell you how much. I needed that. It’s just, I know you worry – Dean worries, Doctor Milner worries, Wendy and all of the girls at the strip club worry, but I have to do things for myself. I need to feel like I can still take care of myself – you know?”

“Even when that means blowing twenty bucks on a cab when you don’t have to?”

“Even then,” Sam replies with a smile. He gives Danny’s hand a little squeeze and lets go, too aware of the quickening of the man’s pulse. He likes Danny, but he doesn’t want that kind of attention now, doesn’t need it, and can honestly think of nothing more horrifying than having to relearn how to move around another person’s body by touch alone. It’s one of the reasons he enjoys spending time home alone with his brother – there’s no complication of sex or romance, they more or less get along, and they can move around each other easily, sight unseen. Years of working together in the darkness taught them that kind of symmetry and he supposes if Dean wasn’t his brother that Danny would have reason to be jealous as hell.

“You couldn’t be more stubborn if you tried, Sam Winslow.” Sam can hear the fondness in Danny’s voice as he calls him by his assumed name, a little too much fondness for comfort, but Sam’s relieved to be back in his good graces.

He stands when he hears a car approach and slow. Despite the fact that the cab pulls right to the curb where they’re standing, the driver still feels the need to honk and Sam bites back a frown or any other expression of irritation just to save himself from having to have the same discussion with Danny all over again when he tells him in possibly even greater detail how and why he doesn’t have to put up with that shit.

“Sounds like my ride,” Sam says with forced cheerfulness and though the change in the air tells him Danny’s stiffened again and probably scowling, Sam still holds up his hand and gives what he hopes seems like a jaunty, friendly wave. He gets in the car, moves fast enough that he gets to the door before Danny can think to open it for him and hollers “bye, Danny!”

He hears a muffled call through the closed window in reply and then the driver has the cab spinning out, even though Sam hasn’t said a word. “Number two Raintree road,” he tells the driver as he settles back into the seat.

“S’all the way on the other side of town, man,” the cabbie replies.

Sam wonders if he’s looking at him in the rear view mirror, he supposes he is, he would if he was driving with a stranger in the backseat, so he straightens, approximates a move that should seem like he’s glancing back at the driver and shrugs. “I wouldn’t pay for a cab if I was only going a couple of blocks.”

The driver softly mumbles something that might be ‘whatever,’ but that Sam thinks is probably closer to ‘asshole.’ He lets its slide, tells himself that he probably wouldn’t have made an issue of it in his old life either. He tries not to think about the fact that his size alone was imposing enough to ward off most irritated comments from strangers in the past. He’s still as big as ever, sit-ups and pushups don’t require him to see and he makes up for the running he can no longer do with a lot of quality time spent on the exercise bikes and treadmills at work. So, he knows he’s no slouch, but he also knows that he seems a lot less intimidating once people realize he’s blind. He told Doctor Milner that he didn’t want people to treat him differently and it’s true, it also just happens to include assholes. So, he leans back and turns his head to the window like he’s watching the street go by outside. Some days, he even pulls it off.

The cab ride takes less time than the ride Dean had given him in the morning. The streets, Sam knows, are just as busy, maybe busier since it’s Friday night, but the driver’s laying on the gas more heavily than Dean did – which is probably saying something. Sam doesn’t engage him in small talk, doesn’t ask about his day, if he’s got kids, or what he’s got to do that’s got him in such a hurry. He figures a day at the gym has left him a little ripe and he’s not in the mood for conversation anyway.

They don’t slow much, stop suddenly enough that Sam has to brace himself against the back of the seat with a small frown, but he doesn’t bitch about it as he pulls out his wallet.

“Nineteen-fifty,” the driver says.

Sam feels for the money and each differentiating fold on the bills. The ones he leaves whole, fives folded in half, tens in thirds and so on until the fifty in his wallet is folded tightly like an accordion. It’s not how Charles Yancey would have him fold his money, but Sam’s not sure that it matters so long as he’s consistent. He pulls out a twenty and a five, not sure that the drive and the attitude was worth a five dollar plus tip, but he figures he might as well stay in good graces since it’s a sure bet that he’ll need a cab  again sooner or later.

He hands over the money as he opens the door and is just reaching for his gym bag when he realizes that his earlier acting wasn’t as good as he thought. Maybe he missed the rearview mirror entirely when glancing up, maybe the driver’s heard of him – Rafferty’s not that big of a town after all – or maybe the driver’s just more astute than Sam gave him credit for. Whatever it was that gave him away, he knows the driver has caught on to the fact that he’s blind and feels like trying to screw him over because of it.

“I said nineteen dollars and fifty cents,” the cab driver says slowly, like Sam’s stupid instead of blind. “This is six bucks.”

“It’s a twenty and a five,” Sam says firmly and gets out of the car. “Keep trying to screw me and it’s going to be less than that or nothing.” He shuts the door, slams it really, and stands there, refusing to walk away because he doesn’t want to seem like he’s running.

He’s not surprised when he hears the front door of the cab opening, he’s not thrilled about it either, but he supposes he expected this possibility, maybe in some way even craved it a little from the moment he decided not to walk away.

“No, see,” and Sam can almost hear him sneer when he says the word, “I’m the one getting screwed here, man. I took one last call because Dwight’s busy running guys to and from the titty bar north of town and what do I get? I get some blind guy pulling a con on me, probably because you figure you can get away with it, right? Like maybe all the government checks you people get for being disabled isn’t enough so you think you should screw me over to make up for it.”

“You really don’t want to get into it with me,” Sam says quietly and stands tall, hoping that his height and his build still work for him now that his ‘I can and will fuck you up’ glare is probably missing the target entirely.

“What, you think you’re some kind of bad ass because you left the gym? Like sharing protein smoothies with the town fairy and sitting on a bowflex for an hour makes you some kind of…”

Sam doesn’t wait for him to finish. He steps forward, even as he wonders if this is maybe more about Danny – said town fairy, though he’s pretty sure Rafferty has more than one – than it is the cabbie trying to dick him around just because he thinks he can. He doesn’t really care. He’s still being screwed with and he doesn’t like listening to his friends get bashed. It’s one thing when Dean makes a gay crack or two – Sam knows Dean’s played the field on both sides of the fence and really doesn’t give a shit who sticks what where so long as everyone’s grown and happy with the results. But, random mean-spirited crap from someone that has no reason, not one Sam cares to hear about, isn’t something he wants to put up with.

The driver isn’t there when he moves, he’s stepped to the left. Sam can hear him move because he’s a noisy bastard, keys jangling from somewhere around his belt, breath loud, almost obnoxiously so like he’s got to do it with his mouth open, shoes sliding in the wet grass with a slippery little squeak. He can’t see, but he doesn’t have to, not for this. Sam’s fast, always has been, and feels a mean sense of satisfaction when the driver gasps in surprise after Sam snaps out his hand and grabs hold of him. He turns him around and pushes him, not letting go, until the cabbie stumbles and hits the side of the cab with a thump.

“I said you don’t want to get into it with me,” Sam tells him.

“Look, it’s just… I…”

“It’s just that you’re a dick.” Sam shoves him into the cab again and crowds him, not giving the cabbie any room to throw a punch at him or do so much as try to drive a knee into his groin. “Some random, pissy little dick who wants to talk crap about my friend…”

“I’m sorry,” the cabbie blurts out and then rushes forward with a litany about his shitty hours and cheating ex-girlfriend and God knows what else like it’s some kind of excuse, like it’s even supposed to matter to Sam. “I just, uh, I didn’t want to get screwed, man. Really.”

Sam leans in, fakes a long hard glare at the man because, God help him, Charles fucking Yancey once told him that some people get unnerved, absolutely spooked staring into the pissed off face of someone who can’t see them at all. Maybe it’s the glassiness in his eyes, maybe it’s the unfocused way he must stare, maybe it’s just some primitive, superstitious sense that Sam can somehow see with something other than his eyes. Whatever it is, he can hear the quickening of the cabbie’s breath and can feel him shiver slightly beneath his grasp like a cat just walked over his grave.

Sam reaches for the money the cab driver’s still clutching and pulls it out of his hands with one final shove. “ _Now_ , I’m screwing you. If you want to make something of it, go ahead. I’ve been fighting monsters in the dark my whole life, I don’t need to see a thing to kick the shit out of you.”

Neither of them say anything, maybe the cabbie thinks about trying him, maybe he doesn’t, but he still slides out from beneath Sam when he can and all but runs around the car to the driver’s side. Sam backs away a few steps and thinks it was a wise move when the cab speeds away with a screech of tires on wet pavement.

“Yeah,” Sam says with a small, meanly satisfied grin, “that’s kind of what I thought. Dickhead.”

He then secures his gym bag more securely on his shoulder and crosses the city sidewalk to the grass, where he promptly steps in what smells a hell of a lot like dog shit. “Yeah, Sam. You’re bad ass all right. Great. Just great.”

The water in the shower is perfect. Absently he can hear Phil scrabbling along the bathroom sink, now and then harmonizing with Men at Work playing over the shower radio. Sam sighs as he tilts his head back into the spray and lets go of the day – the cab  driver, his less than stellar session with Doctor Milner, and even Danny’s harmless, kind, and sort of sweet flirting while they’d munched on their respective salads during an impromptu dinner break at work. Dean’s bad dream still lingers, though he can barely even feel the bruise on his cheek any longer, but when he turns around to brace his hands against the shower wall and lets the water course down his back, even that fades away until there’s nothing but the hot water starting to loosen him up.

Sam sighs contentedly and reaches for the shampoo. He and Dean use the same things in the shower, it makes it easier and after years of smelling like the same motel soap, there’s no real reason to change old habits now.  He has no reason to hurry and no real reason to linger once he’s relaxed and clean until he drags the sudsy washcloth over his balls and gets a surprised jump of interest from his dick. Sam thinks about ignoring it like it’s a Jehovah’s Witness at the door who will stop knocking if he pretends they’re not there, but when he moves the washcloth he grows hard and heavy at the sensation.

He groans and gives up as if it was a battle of wills and the smaller head just won the round. Sam grasps himself, feels the slip of skin against skin while he continues to tug at his balls with the washcloth in his other hand and it doesn’t take long for his hips to buck involuntarily. He’s had periods of celibacy before, it’s not exactly a first, but even he has to admit that two years is pushing it. Dean has a lot to say on the subject of living like a monk, hell, Dean has a lot to say about most things, but Sam doesn’t want to think about him just now. He doesn’t want to think of anyone, not even Georgie or Danny or anyone else that’s caused the blood to flow south lately. He grips himself hard, starts jacking himself in earnest while he scrubs at his balls almost brutally and then behind and underneath them while he spreads his legs just enough to send a lightning strike of want and need and sharp, desperate lust throughout his body. He doesn’t have to think of anyone to enjoy this, and he doesn’t, but some part of him recognizes that there’s something mechanical, maybe even joyless and sad about it all. His body doesn’t care. His hips are stuttering, bucking into his hand and when everything tightens up, when his blackened vision is replaced with electric sparks of neon, Sam comes so hard that he shouts and feels momentarily like he’s going to pass out.

“Oh, shit,” Sam breathes and has to reach a hand to the wall of the shower to steady himself. His dick spurts a last few drops, making him tingle and shiver despite the warmth and steam of the shower, and Sam breathes again deeply, feeling a relaxed lassitude down deep in his joints.

“God, maybe everyone is right and I need to get out there more. Jesus.”

He talks to himself more, Sam knows, isn’t sure why when being alone without sight isn’t more or less lonely than being alone with fully functional vision. Before the infection had claimed his eyesight, he might have jerked off in the shower, toweled off, and gone on. Now he chatters to himself about it and everything else and half wonders if he’s subconsciously trying to fill the void left from his lack of vision with constant sound. It is, he supposes, a little weird and maybe something he should consider talking to Doctor Milner about.

Not the masturbation, he thinks to himself, almost overcome with the urge to laugh nervously. Definitely not that because he doesn’t think he can handle a clinical evaluation of jacking off in the shower with a woman whose wry, warm voice reminds him far too much of Ellen.

“Nope, never going to happen,” Sam confirms aloud and scrubs at the bottom of the tub with his foot, dragging his big toe through his own semen in an attempt to let it wash down the drain. Because, again, that’s a discussion he doesn’t want to have, especially not with Dean who won’t let him live down leaving spunk in the shower. Ever.

Sam rinses himself off, then clicks off the radio and the shower. He pushes back the shower curtain and hears a confused chirp and the sound of Phil’s wings beating madly against the plastic curtain.

“Aw, buddy, I’m sorry,” Sam says and slides the curtain back again so the canary can take flight. He hears Phil leave the bathroom with the sound of his small wings beating and, though it means nothing to the bird and is probably just Sam filling the quiet house with noise, he calls after the bird again. “Said I was sorry, Phil, and you know, it’s kind of creepy that you’re hanging around on the shower curtain when I’m jerking off.”

“Dude,” he says to himself after a moment as he reaches to the right for his towel, “now you’re having conversations with a canary about masturbation and privacy. No wonder you have to see a shrink. God, Sam, get it together.”

The phone rings as he’s pulling his hoodie over his wet hair. Sam yanks it down over his head and hurries to the living room, hand on the rail even for the short flight of steps so he doesn’t lose his balance and fall on his ass. He knows reasonably that it’s Dean checking in, the time has to be about right for the lull between acts at the club and it’s probably just Dean on his break and calling home like he does most every night he works. But, old habits and fears die hard, and Sam isn’t ashamed to admit that he’s half afraid that it’ll be a call from Wendy or the hospital to tell him Dean’s been hurt.

Sam reaches the phone on the third ring, doesn’t trip because everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be, no deviations in the house of the blind after all, and he tries not to sound like he just ran to the phone when he picks it up.

He can hear the sleazy sound of ‘come fuck me’ rock, as Dean calls it, before he even says hello and Sam breathes out a little sigh of relief when he hears his brother telling someone ‘no, Bubbles does not make house calls, fucker.’

“Fun night trying to convince the Glass Houses patrons that stripping does not equal prostitution?” Sam asks by way of hello.

“Goddamned awesome,” Dean replies irritably. “It was a lot easier before Georgie and Carmen started really winding them up. You know, for a really nice girl – Georgie deserves an academy award for acting like such a slut. The sounds she makes, Sam. I tell you, we’re crossing the border into live porn and Wendy better have them tone it down before we really do get shut down.”

“God… Dean…” _I just jerked off in the shower, please don’t put that into my head and hey –_ “Don’t call her a slut.”

“Sorry, Sam. You know I think the world of Georgie, but God _damn_ , it’s just so hot and kinda nasty because she’s like the kid sister I never had. Well, the kid sister you never had anyway. You got the job done well enough, far as I’m concerned.”

“Bite me,” Sam tells him and Dean laughs, happier sounding now than he had when Sam had first answered the phone.

“So, how was your therapy appointment and work?”

“Work was fine,” Sam says dodging the first question. He doesn’t want to get into that now because Dean will ask why it sucked and after he’s done thinking about breaking Doctor Milner’s kneecaps for the room change scenario, Sam’s pretty sure he’d move right into bitching him out for being a dumbass too stubborn to use the tools at hand. That fact that he’s right, that Milner, Charles fucking Yancey, and everyone else is probably right doesn’t concern him. He gets by fine without the cane and just proved to some anonymous dickhead cabbie forty-five minutes ago that he can take care of himself well enough. He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t. Not really. But, to be safe from getting led into a discussion of his appointment with Beth Milner, Sam steers the conversation into a direction Dean won’t be able to resist.

“Well… work was mostly fine. Sally Vonschtadt nailed me again after the Senior Cyclists class.”

Dean sputters like he was about to swallow a drink of something – probably a beer – then cackles with the same amused hilarity he does each time he watches _Porky’s_. “Ass grab again… oh, man, did she try to play off the two handed grab with her “oh, Sam, I’m so sorry, I’m such an old klutz, dearie me!” routine?”

“Worse,” Sam replies and he knows he must be desperate to avoid talking about therapy to give Dean enough ammunition to last him for weeks. Dean’s seen him at his worst. There’s no way Sam could come up with anything worse than Dean seeing him strung out on demon blood or climbing the walls from lack of it or hiding in a corner because years of torture broke something inside of him and broke it hard.

 “Frontal?”

“No, she grabbed my bicep… what do you think?”

Dean loses it. He laughs like he’s just found him covered head to toe in killer clown glitter and when Sam doesn’t think he can take much more, he hears Veronica through the phone ask “what the hell?” Dean, being Dean, tells her exactly what he finds so funny and Sam has no doubt that everyone at Glass Houses down to Georgie and Shaun the town drunk will have heard the story before closing.

There’s a rustle that sounds like the phone changing hands and then Veronica all but purrs over the phone. “Sam, baby, if you’re that hard up, you only had to ask… I told you, it’s always gonna be free for you.”

Sam groans. “Thanks, Veronica… uh, yeah. I’m good, but thanks. Listen, can you give the phone back to my jackass brother?”

“Sure thing, stud,” and he can hear her tell Dean “well, I guess I lose that bet – he’s not gay, he just likes ‘em real mature.”

Dean laughs again, freaking guffaws really, and Sam can’t help but whine a little, even though he knows he did this all to himself. “You guys! Sally Vonschtadt’s seventy. She’s _seventy_! C’mon… Dean.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Dean chokes and Sam doesn’t have to work his imagination too much to picture him wiping a tear from his eye. “It’s just really… well? I guess at least you’re letting someone cop a feel, Sammy.”

“Oh, Jesus, Dean. That’s just gross,” he sputters. “I’m scarred for life and may never have sex again.” _Except by myself in the shower with a peeping tom canary, apparently._

“C’mon, Sammy. Vonschtadt has a sexy old lady’s voice. Put her in a wonder bra and one of those miracle girdles and you’ll never know…”

“I hate you so much,” Sam tells him, even if he kind of likes that they’ve reached a comfortable enough place that he and Dean can make the stray blind joke without cringing.

“Get some and you’ll hate me less,” Dean says. “Seriously, Sam…”

“Please, not again,” he interrupts. “I’ve already had to field the ‘why don’t you get out there more’ crap from Danny and Doctor Milner a lot this week. Not you, too, okay?”

“Maybe,” Dean says over the din of music from the club, “everyone’s on you about it because it’d be good for you, Sam. You’re a people person, you’re into the whole sharing and caring shit, and, man, chicks really dig that. Georgie would probably move heaven and earth for a night alone with you.”

“Georgie? Georgie that likes you so much she knitted you an afghan? The one you wallow in every night and keep trying to get me to feel?”

“Sam,” Dean says with all seriousness, “I know you can’t see man, but I didn’t think you were blind all the way through. That girl’s crushing on you like a fat kid for pie.”

He thinks back this morning and how light her touch had been against his cheek, how tentative. “No,” he says finally. “No way.” _Why not? Really, Sam, why the hell not? Because you’re blind?_ “She made that thing for you after you followed her home last month because that creeper from DeWitt kept slipping his phone number in her panties.”

“Christ, you can be stupid. She knitted the afghan for you, punk, but got so shy and tongue tied when she came over that she didn’t know how to say “hey, I dig you and made this for you,” so she gave it to me instead. She worked on that thing for weeks, Sam. Saw her knitting it between acts and she made sure to use yarn and stitches that you’d like for the – what’d she call it? – tactile enjoyment of it. She’s smart, Sammy, really damned smart, and like I said, she’s into you.” And then, for emphasis, Dean adds “And I think she’d probably really like it if you were into her, you know, literally, dumbass.”

“I didn’t know she made it for me,” Sam says quietly. “It’s just…” He shakes his head and changes his grip on the phone. “Did you really just call to nag me to go on a date or what?”

“Nope, I called to make sure you made it home all right – big brother’s prerogative,” he says when Sam makes a small noise of protest, “and to tell you that I got you something.”

Sam perks up a little. “You got me a present?”

“Yep. And I had to haggle old Mr. Tyler down the road from twenty bucks down to five for it too. You know, this morning at the fucking garage sale thing,” he adds by way of explanation. “Dude had a complete set of Corningware for sale … shut up, Sam… you know we don’t have anything decent to bake casseroles and shit in and if you say one word about my Susie Homemaker mad skills, I will not make Dad’s hot dog and bean casserole for you when I’m off Sunday. Shit, it’d save me your toxic fumes afterwards anyway.”

“No, no,” Sam says quickly, stifling a laugh because, of all the weird shit they ate as kids, their Dad’s hot dog and bean casserole is the stuff of legend and something that Sam has never once managed to successfully reproduce. “I’ll be good. I swear and I’ll even take a Beano before I eat. Cross my heart, man. So, uh… what’d you get me?”

“Well… shit, hang on.” Dean muffles the phone, likely against his chest, but Sam can hear him call out to Wendy that, no, she should not attempt to change out the Budweiser because last time she screwed up the taps. “Give me a minute and I’ll do it,” Dean calls as he lifts up the phone. “Gotta go in a minute, Sam, so you have exactly ninety seconds to tell me what’s up with you, why you won’t go on a date with a chick you know’s hot because a – I told you so and b – I never lie about a hot chick. Danny’s hot for you too, if you’re into swinging sausage. And, you know, he’s not bad for a guy. Built and shit if that’s what you’re into.”

“Christ, Dean, really?”

“Yes, Sam, really. C’mon, man, spill it. Or spend the night trying to feel around the house for your present and get good and pissed when you can’t find it.”

“Dean…”

“Tick-tock, Sam. You want your present tonight or not?”

Sam sighs. Fuck. Manipulated by his brother for a five dollar surprise from a yard sale. Sometimes he wishes Dean didn’t know him so well. “I don’t know how to date as a blind guy, Dean. I used to hold doors open, buy flowers, tell my date how much I liked her dress and shit… it’s all just awkward and stuff now, you know? I don’t want to feel like a jackass because I’m aiming a kiss at her mouth and end up slobbering on her nose or fumbling around in the dark all the time because I can’t see anything. It’s just… awkward and I’m not used to it.”

“Dude,” Dean says patiently, “ninety percent of sex is done by feel alone. You’ve had sex, I’ve walked in on it, I know you know this. You don’t have to see to feel a girl – or hey, a guy – beneath your hands. And since everyone I know who wants to jump your bones or go out with you thinks you’re an awesome guy, no accounting for taste, and some kind of genius hero for managing this whole blind thing like a champ, I don’t think anyone you’d go out with is going to laugh at you because you can’t find the door of a strange place or because you’ll either need your cane or have to let them lead you down a sidewalk. You’re just making a bunch of bullshit excuses.”

“For what?”

“For the fact that you’re afraid of really being happy and you’re secretly hoping Cas will show up with his mojo recharged so he can fix your eyes. Then, what, I guess you’ll figure we’ll blow town and nothing here will really mean a damn.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“Don’t you?” Dean asks. “Because a guy recovering fully from blindness is the kind of miracle that gets spread around, Sam. It’d be the kind of freak thing to wind up on CNN when the news is slow and you know, that’d be it, we’d have to ditch.”

“I _don’t_ want to leave,” Sam says more firmly and he doesn’t, not really. This is the first real home he’s had since living with Jess, maybe the first he’s ever had and for all that there’s so much so wrong with his life, he really does like the little life he and Dean have carved out for themselves. But, Dean’s right – miracle cures mean speedy exits and he half wonders if the reason he hasn’t let himself wish like hell on Cas to pop in and fix him is because he knows he would never be able to refuse.

“You’re saying you’d let Cas go, or even maybe let him hang around if the fucker can make the time,” and Sam can hear how much Dean misses him with that sentence, “and not let him fix you if he could?”

“You’re saying you’d want me to? That you want me to stay like this if there was a chance I could see again?”

“No,” Dean sighs, “Jesus, Sammy, no. I’d probably be on Cas or anyone else to fix it before you could start thinking it all to death. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“I like it here, Sam.” His voice is small, tired, but not in the way it used to be, not in the exhausted to his bones, hurting to his very soul kind of tired that Sam’s heard a thousand times before. He sounds almost resigned, like he stopped to think about life at some point during the day and decided that it was pretty damned good.

Sam sighs. “I like it here, too. It’s a lot to lay on me right now and I don’t know that I think dating or not dating really makes a difference if Cas did show up and we ever reached that kind of decision. It’s also a little shitty to try to get me interested in a girl to force my hand.”

“I know. And I’m sorry that I’m being a whiny bitch. S’your job,” he adds with a sad weak laugh.

“God, Dean. This is a helluva heavy discussion to have while you’re at work with a bunch of strippers. Just… just trust me a little, okay? I hate being blind, Dean. I just fucking hate it, but I’m not going to walk away from this place whether I’m dating G… uh – “ He almost says Georgie, but stops himself, seeing no reason to fuel whatever weird fire is burning in Deans gut over setting him up with her. “Whether I’m dating anyone or not. You know miracles don’t always work out for us and if it seemed like it would, like it’s just Cas and it’s okay, then we’d figure it out – go away for awhile like I’m having some kind of surgery or new treatment or something. I could wear bandages over my eyes or sunglasses or whatever we had to do to make it believable, okay?”

“You think anyone would really buy that?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says honestly, “but we could try. And it’s all speculation anyway because Cas is… he’s…”

“Yeah,” Dean says quietly, “Cas is. But maybe someday he won’t be.”

Sam curls up on the couch with Dean’s – no his – afghan and takes a moment to run his fingers over the soft yarn. It’s knitted in whorled, ridged segments that that captivate him for a moment. It almost feels like Braille, not in any actual way, but in the sense that it’s some kind of secret language that can only be deciphered with touch. He likes it, he realizes. It doesn’t matter what color it is, if it will keep him warm, though he can tell that it’ll do an admirable job there. He likes the feel of it and maybe even the sentiment behind it – that it’s something special, something that he’s uniquely qualified to truly appreciate because he won’t get distracted by color or visual pattern.

It makes him feel good, makes him feel a little less sad after the bad taste the conversation with Dean had left in his mouth. His stomach ties into knots when he thinks about seeing, when he thinks about Cas showing up someday or maybe never showing up at all. So, Sam doesn’t think about it. He sits back, pulls a leg up onto the couch, making Phil peep a little because he’s starting to snooze from his place on Sam’s shoulder.

“Shh, it’s okay, Phil. Just getting comfortable here. You relax, little guy.” Phil chirrups a little in response and side-steps a bit closer to Sam’s neck before settling down again.

Before hanging up, Dean had told him to check the top of the record player for his surprise gift and Sam hadn’t been too amazed to find that a record lay on top of the turntable’s dustcover. It wasn’t labeled with the embossed Braille tape they labeled things with and Sam still has no clue what it might be or why Dean had spent time haggling over it. He likes music, maybe not as much as Dean and, well, no one likes music quite as much as Dean, Sam thinks, but he can’t think of any particular record – a record for God sakes – that Dean would see and immediately think of him.

Curious, Sam finds the remote on the table next to him. The remotes have all been labeled and he doesn’t have any trouble finding the button to turn the stereo on. Though nothing’s playing yet, he still turns down the volume considerably because he knows Dean was the last one – until this point, the only one – to have used the record player. When he’s hit it enough times that it’s not likely to still be at an ear-shattering volume, Sam hits phono and play and waits.

It’s too quiet. The record’s had time to get going, but Sam can’t hear a thing, not even with his better than average hearing. He turns it up tiny bits at a time until he can hear music playing – jaunty music – the sound of Kirk Douglas singing, in fact. Phil shifts on his shoulder, seems to bob a little like he’s thinking of joining in, but the song doesn’t last too long. Dean didn’t get him music, he bought him a copy of _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_.

Sam knows he’s taken to surrounding himself with noise: music, audio books, conversation – even when it’s just with himself or the bird. It doesn’t take much to know Dean’s realized it too and that he found something that wouldn’t just fill the void left by his eyesight, but something he knew first hand would keep him entertained. They’d chanced upon the story one snowy winter in Michigan when they’d been desperate enough due to lack of TV to hike through drifts of snow to the library. They’d listened to it in an audio booth one Saturday, both of them sharing the same set of headphones because the library didn’t have more than one per booth. Though Dean had pronounced it lame and Sam hadn’t been quick to deny it because he’d been at that age when Dean was cool and most of what he said was true by default, they started looking for it in every library in every town, big or small, that they came across for the next couple of years. It was like a treasure hunt for them, one that made arriving in a new town a little more bearable on Sam and he feels a rush of affection for Dean now that’s so strong that it almost overwhelms him.

It’s more than just something to pass the time, though he’s always liked Jules Verne and more than enjoys this telling of one of his stories. It’s Dean’s way of helping him settle in. It’s been two years since he’s gone blind, more than a year and a half since they moved to Rafferty and Sam thinks that Dean would have gotten him this record the first week if he’d known it was available. He’s glad he didn’t, he thinks it better this way, that the timing’s better now when he’s actually starting to get comfortable and needs something to tell him that it’s okay, that good or bad, Dean’s going to be here with him and find some way to make it good for him.

Sam grins and pulls the afghan Georgia made him up a little more snugly, careful not to dislodge Phil, though he knows the bird will hop off his shoulder and fly away when he gets to really wanting to doze. He listens raptly to the story, missing nothing because it was meant to be listened to, not watched, and finds that he still remembers a few lines here and there.

The first side ends before he knows it and though he’s enjoying listening to the story, Sam doesn’t get up to turn the record over. He’s comfortable, more content at this moment than he’s been in a long time, possibly in years. He’s happy to close his eyes, it feels natural, comes for once without bitterness because there’s no difference as far as vision is concerned whether his eyes are open or closed. The static of the needle dragging through the empty space at the end of the record is comforting and sounds to him a lot like gentle rain.

Sam slips easily into sleep and, as always, he can see once he starts to dream. He’s wandering the Nautilus in his dream, no one aboard but him as he inspects cabin after cabin. He doesn’t feel spooked by this isolation, though it’s clear when he doesn’t linger in any of the rooms, interested in neither art nor technology – or even Captain Nemo’s unlikely organ, that he’s looking for something. The air is fresh and smells of the sea. Sam thinks this means that the submarine must have surfaced recently or perhaps is still sitting atop the water. He finds a cabin with a large glass port for watching the sea and learns nothing. The water is clear and blue with a dozen or more varieties of many colored fish swimming around the Nautilus. He watches them for a moment and then goes.

Curious, and a little dissatisfied because he can’t find what he’s looking for, or even think of what it might be, Sam climbs up through the decks until he reaches the last door that will take him topside. Sunlight greets him when he opens the hatch, warm and hot and blinding. He remembers that he’s supposed to close his eyes, that he’s not supposed to look at the sun and he feels a little strange, a little spooked for forgetting something so basic.

When he climbs up on the deck and his eyes start to adjust to the glare of the tropical sun on the water, Sam sees that the Nautilus has surfaced close to an island. It looks like a postcard with its aquamarine lagoon and picturesque palm trees leaning over a white beach broken here and there with dark spots that might be rocks or might be large swathes of washed up kelp. The submarine is good sized and, as such, remains a fair distance from the land, but the swim doesn’t look that far – he’s swum farther before and Sam doesn’t think it’s going to be a problem. He could take a boat, he remembers Nemo pointing one out to him earlier when he’d toured the sub with him hours before.

Sam takes off his shirt and ties it around his waist as he looks down at the water. _Perhaps Nemo’s what – who – I’m looking for_ , he thinks and dives in. The water’s cool, though the closer he swims to land and the shallower it gets, the more it’s like tepid bathwater. It still feels good to swim, to stretch, and to go without anyone leading him along, though Sam can’t for the life of him think of why he’d need to take anyone’s arm or have them lead him about.

When he can stand, he does so and ends up jogging through the surf while pushing his dripping hair back from his eyes. Sam approaches the first dark patch on the beach and as he draws closer to it, he slows and comes to an uncertain halt thirty feet away. It’s a footprint – a perfect one with the outline of five toes and a perfectly formed heel, but it’s huge and deep. So deep that Sam thinks if he jumped down into the depression in the sand that the edge of it would come chest high.

He looks back at the Nautilus uncertainly and though the swim had only taken twenty or so minutes, Sam thinks that the submarine looks very far away. He can no longer see any discernable features on her – from this distance it looks like the ridge of whale’s back or maybe one of the rocks he thought he might find on the beach. He’s a little winded from the swim, but not so much so that he can’t make it back. For a moment Sam considers it, then remembers the silence of the submarine when he’d been onboard. Whatever he’s looking for, whatever there is for him to find, he doesn’t think that he’s going to come across it on Nemo’s ship.

That leaves following where the footprints lead or where they’ve been. He isn’t sure he likes the idea of catching up with whatever made such huge craters in the sand, but he doesn’t think he’s going to like finding the place that they came from any more, so he walks forward. Sam tries not think how small, how tiny and insignificant his footprints must look next to the mammoth ones in the sand.

He walks and finds nothing. The sun goes out in a spectacular wash of orange that’s so beautiful it almost hurts to look at it, but Sam doesn’t look away, just walks on, eyes on the horizon as the sky turns smoky purple and then midnight blue punctuated with a thousand stars or more. The night’s balmy, but saved from being sticky thanks to the trade winds that blow in from the sea. The breeze blows his hair back from his face, keeps him comfortable enough and though he still doesn’t know what he’s looking for and finds that he likes the thought of the monster that must have left such massive footprints even less now that it’s dark, Sam’s mostly happy.

It’s only as he walks for another few minutes that he starts to get truly nervous. The sky ahead is growing lighter. Sam can make no sense of it, the sun just went down a short while ago and everywhere else he looks, everywhere but ahead of him, it’s still perfectly dark. The palm trees are little more than whispering shade, the sand behind him is washed out to a dark gray lit only by the light of the stars and it doesn’t make sense for it to look very much like the dawn up ahead, but he can’t think of what else it might be.

Sam slows his pace until he’s creeping ahead in the fine sand only little bits at a time. He stops soon after, stares at the dawn and realizes that it’s drawing closer. This sends a spike of fear deep into his gut and he suddenly wishes that he’d never left the Nautilus at all, can’t think of why he didn’t wait around for Nemo or Dean or Dad to come back because they’re going to be pissed that he ran off without a word, just pissed, and now he’s scared shitless, even if he doesn’t know why, and wishes like hell that they were here.

The sky turns white, throwing the palm trees and each and every frond upon them into stark relief, as something massive, something taller than the tallest building Sam knows of reaches the edge of the cove several hundred feet away from where he’s standing. Sam wants to run, knows it’s futile because he can’t think of anywhere he’d go that something so huge couldn’t see him, but it doesn’t matter because his feet are rooted to the spot where he’s standing.

It bends down, this massive thing, leans towards him until there’s nothing else at all in Sam’s vision, just this blinding face that shifts every few seconds into something divine, something holy, something angry, fierce, and terrifying. As it comes closer, as it encompasses the whole of everything Sam sees and everything Sam knows, he stares up into its ever-changing, beautiful and horrifying face and knows it.

“Michael,” he whispers as he stares up into the burning suns he uses for eyes.

Somewhere an alarm sounds – not the bells or klaxons he remembers from the Nautilus, but something stranger, something like a car alarm, but Sam can’t think of what it means, doesn’t know if it means that he’s in danger or that there’s help on the way. He doesn’t know anything but the face of the angel that stares down at him, that draws closer to him until he’s so close and so massive that Sam can no longer make out any features, but can only see the shifting currents of electricity arcing, almost dancing across the stuff that it calls skin.

 _“There you are,”_ Michael says with a voice loud enough to burst eardrums, though Sam thinks he might actually be whispering. _“I’ve been looking for you, Sam, and there you are.”_

Sam wakes with a silent scream, remembering more about his time in the cage than he has since Cas got into his head and swallowed down as much of his memories as he could. He thrashes beneath the oppressive weight of the afghan all but smothering him, but he does it quietly, so quietly. Lucifer might have enjoyed his screams, but Michael had taught him how much he valued silence and how far he would go to get it.

At this moment, his blindness is torture. There isn’t much Sam would give to see anything, the darkness of his unlit home, the tiny lights the stereo must surely have, moonlight or starlight or streetlights glowing with their sickly, slightly spooky sodium vapor glow – anything but the image still stuck in his mind of Michael bending down towards him as he had a thousand times or more. He wishes on Cas in this moment, prays and begs with everything he’s got, lips silently forming _Cas, please, I need your help, please, I need you_ , but there’s no rush of angel’s wings or the smell of sun warmed earth to tell him that he’s heard him.

He gets himself free from the afghan, pushes it to the floor, and leans forward on the couch, head in his hands, elbows on his knees as he works on breathing and slowing the machine gun fire of his heart in his chest. He wants to turn a light on. He wants it to do some good to turn a light on, but it won’t. Darkness is one of the unwavering constants in his universe now and nothing he has left in his bag of self-soothing tricks will provide the same comfort as the glorious simplicity of light.

It’s strange, he supposes. Both Michael and Lucifer had been so bright in the cage, had so often blinded him and he remembers now those first few days in the hospital when his vision had failed him, remembers hanging onto Dean with a death grip and telling him that he wasn’t sick, he was just blinded by the memory of angels. He wonders again if it isn’t true, wonders if the infection that ruined his optic nerve hadn’t come from some genetic failing woven into his DNA with the exquisite, exacting carefulness of Michael and Lucifer so that he would always remember them. It does nothing to slow the painful speeding of his heart and Sam imagines  the illness blooming until it takes its full course as it had so many times in the cage. He wouldn’t be able to see, wouldn’t be able to speak or move limbs grown slow and heavy as stone, but he’d be able to hear and feel so that there’s nothing but darkness and pain and the sound of them coming for him.

 _No,_ he thinks, but doesn’t say it – can’t, of course say it because he must be quiet, must sit and obey and never once scream, no matter how badly it hurts. Lucifer will torment him, will rip him apart one piece at a time, but Michael will be there, too, leaning in with his white hot eyes and reminding him of how much worse it’ll get if he screams.

“No,” Sam whispers and stands. It feels like a sin to speak, even in such a hushed whisper, but he finds some last shred of defiance in the act and is ready to open his mouth and shout, to sing and scream as loudly as he can in the hopes that they can hear him down in the cage. _I’m still here, you bastards. I’m alive and breathing and there’s nothing you can do to me here._

A grating, awful screech breaks the silence and Sam automatically claps both hands over his mouth to block the scream. They heard. Of course they did, how could they not? They heard and they’re out and Lucifer will peel him like an onion with Michael nearby whispering _not a sound now, Sam, I warn you – not one sound._

He’s caught, the urge to flee so strong that the muscles in his calves are twitching with the expectation of running. He doesn’t know where he could go, but anywhere, somewhere until he can call Dean and just run – away from their warm, little bungalow, away from their friends and jobs and everything that’s made life, and blindness, slowly start to be bearable again. To the other side of the country, to the other side of the world or down into the pits of hell or the monsters’ den of purgatory if that’s what it takes to get away from Heaven’s two most terrible angels. Maybe they could find Cas, maybe Cas could take them away to someplace safe, someplace warm and cozy. Sam wouldn’t even beg Cas to fix him, wouldn’t dream of asking for anything greater than the assurance that Michael and Lucifer could never get to him again.

The screech comes again, followed by a muffled curse, and the frantic cheeping of a bird trapped and terrified.

“Shhh! I tol’ you, he’s blind, but he ain’t fucking deaf, Carl!”

Sam stops cold and automatically snaps his head up, ears cocked towards the kitchen. Someone’s in his house. The thought should be terrifying for a blind man, but relief flows from his suddenly light head down to his fingertips and his toes. There are no angels here, no unearthly torments and a thousand years of suffering – it’s only the promise of human violence now. Sam finds that calming, finds it soothing and has a half-moment of near hysteria where he thinks he might go into the kitchen and hug the hell out of whoever just broke in. His grateful feeling passes when he can hear Phil screech again, followed by the sound of glass breaking, like he’s just flown into the dish drainer by the kitchen sink and toppled a glass to the ground.

“Shit, he’ll have heard that for sure!”

“Get the lights, man. Get the lights and let’s get this fucker.”

Sam doesn’t wait any longer. He moves. He trusts the sameness of the house, trusts Dean to understand how important Sam finds constancy in the space around him. He runs, barefoot and near silent, bypassing the kitchen where he knows it will take some fumbling to find the awkwardly placed light switch. More than anything, he wants to run into the kitchen and start swinging because he hasn’t heard a sound from Phil since the glass broke on the linoleum, but Sam’s in trouble. Human trouble, to be sure, but he has to do something to level the playing field a little. Once the guys leave the kitchen – and he’s pretty sure that one of them is the cab driver from earlier – they’ll have the advantage of being able to turn on a light. The switches and lamps are easy to find in other rooms. Dean’s rewired the rest of the house, after all, added new outlets, moved switches, everything to make things easier on them. It’s only the kitchen he hasn’t tackled yet because it’s a big job and he’s thought of a hundred excuses to put it off. Sam’s bitched about not being able to turn on the microwave and the coffee pot at the same time more than he can count, but he’s grateful for it now.

He holds his hands out as moves, feeling for the wall by the kitchen that leads up the short, two-step flight of stairs. The bedrooms are up there, one across from the other, and it’s the same with the bathroom and the utility closet. There’s not much in there to help him – all of the weapons are secured away in closets, under pillows, and in the Impala, of course. But, the utility closet does have one thing in it besides their hot water heater – the fuse box.

Sam reaches the hall in short order, steps from the bottom of the stairs to the landing with one long stride, and he keeps his hand on the left wall as he walks one, two, and three steps to the small, half door of the utility closet. It’s new, barely makes a sound when he opens it. He would have heard the click of the tumbler as he turned the knob, it would have sounded like cannon shot to him, but he hopes that his hearing is actually more than acute now, hopes for a little super sonic hearing of his own and that, to the average man, not a sound had been made.

He keeps his hand on the bare, unfinished walls of the utility closet and thanks God for Dean who mounted their one broom, mop, and dust mop on wall hooks so that Sam wouldn’t trip over them should he ever have to come in here. He feels around the water heater, notes the sudden flare of heat beneath his fingertips as he touches the tank, and then finds the wall again. He follows it until he reaches the fuse box. Inside, all of the switches have come from the manufacturer labeled in Braille, but he doesn’t need it. The master switch is the biggest. He trips it and backs up the wall behind him, feeling the air behind his back until he comes in contact with the broom on the wall.

The house is perfectly silent now, the hum of fans and the faint whir of electronics have shut down. He can’t hear anything except his own breathing and the sound of intruders in his kitchen. He can’t stay here. The house is small and its few hiding places are easily discovered. More than that, the closet isn’t a good place to get into a fight. It’s too close, he’d have no room to move, and nowhere to back off far enough to use the one advantage he has.

Sam opens the door as quietly as he had the first time and is just stepping out into the hall when he stops to reach back to the wall in the utility closet. He feels along the unfinished concrete until his fingers feel the broom again. He pulls it down and heads out once more. It’s on old broom. The bristled head is wired to the shaft, preventing him from unscrewing it. It makes it unwieldy, but the fact that the handle is wood instead of hollow aluminum like the mop and dust mop makes it the more sensible weapon. Wood will hurt.

He’s too focused on creeping forward and on preparing himself to take anytime to wish that he could see. It’s there, a constant need, a constant desire to have at least that much of his old life back, but unlike his panic at Doctor Milner’s earlier in the day, he doesn’t – can’t – spend any conscious thought on sight. It’s gone. Maybe one day he’ll see again, maybe he won’t, but it doesn’t help him now. He’s got a pissed off cab driver itching for some payback in his house. In his home, the first he’s ever truly had. The fact that it’s not his alone, that he and Dean have somehow pulled themselves together to actually make a home steels him somehow. Sam’s no fool, he’s no superhero with sonar or sonic hearing or psychic ability. He knows he’s not going to kick ass and emerge from this unscathed. But he’s also not going to hide and wait for the inevitable beating just because he’s blind either. It’s his home, his life, he’ll do what he can to protect it.

There’s no time for Sam to focus on his determination or to carefully pick out the sounds he hears. Once he’s reached the end of the hall and stands on the landing above the two steps leading into the living area, there’s only motion and struggle and pain. Perhaps there’s more light in the living room that he thought, perhaps the light over the patio is shining in from the sliding glass door. Whatever the case, as soon as he’s standing just over the living room, he’s spotted – he must be because he can hear the rush of booted feet on the floor Dean let him sand with the big machine they’d rented from the hardware store.

Sam swings the broom, hears the sound of something breaking and thinks it must be the shelf next to the stairs. It’s full of books – his heavier Braille editions and a few of Deans – and DVDs. The few surviving family photos that he hasn’t been able to see in two years are on top and Sam knows that must have been what went down. The broom connects and Sam smiles in vicious satisfaction as he hears a grunt. It doesn’t last long. The cab driver didn’t come alone. Whether it’s him or his friend that he brought along for a little companionable ass kicking, Sam doesn’t know, but he knows when he feels something smash into him. He has no time to duck, no quick second to orientate himself or listen for the sounds coming towards him. He just feels something cold and hard crack into his shoulder.

Sam lurches forward, pain exploding his shoulder. He goes with it, doesn’t take the time to wonder if the guy’s aim was bad or if he’d actually intended to hit him where he did. He uses his forward motion to tip his body forward, hands reaching out blindly – always blindly – to grab hold of someone or something. One of them makes the mistake of punching him. It’s a good shot to the jaw, one that rattles a few of his back molars and fills his mouth with blood. But the mistake was getting that close to him.

He grabs, feels a neck slick with sweat and a head of hair. Sam takes a fistful of hair with his left hand, uses it to hold the man as he fights him, and then starts punching. The cab driver – and it is him, Sam can smell him with his combination of cigarette smoke, Axe cologne, and distinct body odor – doesn’t passively take getting the crap kicked out of him. He hits back, tries to get his knee up to knock him in the groin, and tries to violently twist his head out of Sam’s grasp. Sam can duck, can twist his head out of the way of a punch, but he can’t see them coming and there’s too much noise, too much grunting, swearing, and the crack of fists against flesh, for him to try to pick sounds out that might guide him. He’s taking a beating. He’s hitting the guy hard enough that he knows it’s being reciprocated, but Sam’s hurting. He’s kept his body strong, but he hasn’t had to fight like this in two years. He’s going to tire, he’s going to feel the pain start to drag him down and he knows it.

When the cabbie manages to jerk his head free with a shout vicious and piercing enough to let Sam know that it hurt, that the feel of the guy’s hair still in his hand is real, Sam kicks. His foot connects. He hears a strangled _oomph_ and a low, keening whine.

“Was that your balls? Christ, I hope it was your balls,” Sam taunts. He doesn’t really care if the cabbie responds to his taunts – though he hopes that he stays wherever he is on the floor a foot, maybe more ahead of him. He’s trying to discover where the other guy is. It’s possible that he could have knocked him out with the crack of the broom earlier, but Sam judges that unlikely. He also could have run, but Sam doesn’t think he’s bound to be any luckier in that either.

The other guy, Carl, Sam remembers, isn’t as loud or as foolhardy as the cabbie. He’s still in the house – Sam’s sure of it, thinks he can maybe feel him in a way – and this is confirmed when he hears the faint crunch of shoes on glass. It sounds forward and slightly left, just by the groaning cabbie on the floor. Maybe the guy stooped down to check his friend, maybe he bent to reach for whatever he’d dropped that had been used to crack Sam in the shoulder at the start of this.

It doesn’t matter. The slight sound gives him something to go on. Sam backs up, feels behind him with his left hand while he keeps his right arm out, first throbbing and tingling from all of the punching. He doesn’t feel the wall behind him, not yet, but he also can’t see. The bookshelf had gone down in the fray and as Sam backs up, he starts stepping and sliding on books. He stops, waves his arms for a moment like a man on a tightrope trying to keep his balance. It’s all the time Carl – who can see well enough in the unlit living room, damn him – needs.

Carl rushes him, shoves him with a two-handed push to his midsection that knocks the wind out of him, and Sam goes down, leg twisting badly, ass crashing against the back of the particle board bookcase. Something wrenches in his back, some phantom pain centered around the site of the knife wound scar from Cold Oak that’s been gone since Cas raised him from the cage. There’s no old damage there, but his body must remember the feeling of not-perfectly-healed nerves because the pain is white hot for a moment. It dulls as he flails, as he tries to right himself and catch his breath. He doesn’t get much of a chance because Carl takes that moment to start kicking him.

He’s wearing sneakers, thank God, but it still hurts like a bitch when his foot connects. Sam knows he’s about done for and that pisses him off. He waits for the next kick, actually snarls and goads the guy on. When it comes, when he feels the foot slam into his stomach, Sam doesn’t wait, but grabs hold and twists viciously until he can feel something cracking beneath his hands as the foot turns in ways it wasn’t meant to.

Carl screams like the world’s ending and that makes Sam feel good, makes him forget a little about how much he hurts, how he’s panting because he’s overworked and beaten surely bloody. He feels like shouting, feels like jumping up and down on the broken bookcase and maybe beating his chest for a second because, yeah, he’s blind as a bat and he just kicked a little ass. The fact that he was soundly thrashed in the process doesn’t even matter. He feels good, hurts like hell, but feels good. Feels like he should drink a beer and play an old record for Phil and –

_Phil._

Sam whistles, or tries to. His bruise, swollen lips won’t purse enough to make a sound except for a rush of forced air. He sits up, thinks about trying to stand, but there’s too much shit in the way. He’ll trip, he’ll fall on his ass, and it occurs to him that he needs his cane and needs it badly. He crawls forward on his hands and knees, passes the two men groaning, and struggles forward towards the couch.

His gym bag with the folded cane isn’t there, it’s on a hook by the front door, but the fight never made it this far into the living room. The phone will be where it’s supposed to be. He’ll call for help – Dean or, fuck, Danny if he has to – his number’s programmed into speed dial too, after all.

When he reaches the couch, Sam stands. The floor’s clear here, nothing beneath his bare feet but polished wood. Dean. He needs to call Dean, needs to get him home so that they can find Phil, hopefully unscathed. Needs him to find the bird a vet, even if they have to go to the twenty-four hour emergency animal care center in DeWitt, if he’s not. Sam uses the couch to guide him. He keeps his hand on the back of it until he reaches the edge, then holds onto the arm of the couch as he stretches out like he’s doing some kind of awkward squat in the direction of the phone.

He pulls it off the charger, turns it on, and hits number one on the speed dial – Dean’s cell. Sam stands, rests against the arm of the couch, and can’t help but mutter “c’mon, c’mon, pick up!” while it rings.

“No!”

Sam's too focused on the phone to hear the cabbie coming. Shit, maybe his ears are ringing too much for him to have ever had a hope of hearing it, but he has no idea that the cabbie has gotten off the floor and is coming towards him until the phone is knocked from his grasp. He has just enough time to get his hands up in a defensive posture before he’s shoved back against the couch and something white hot catches him in his right side. He falls back over the arm of the couch as the knife’s twisted before being yanked out.

“Carl – get up, get up!”

“I can’t, bastard broke my ankle. Help me, Gene.”

Sam can hear scuffling and the sound of pained groans. He figures this must be Gene getting the other guy up from the floor. He hears them both limping towards him and turns his head automatically. There’s nothing to see, of course.

“Jesus… I think he’s dying. I think you killed him.”

“He was going to call the cops.”

“Cops… we gotta get out here. And I mean way out of here. We mighta left fingerprints and-and trace and all that shit you see on CSI! Why’d you have to fucking kill him?”

 _Did he kill me?_ Sam wonders this as he’s lying over the arm of the couch like he’s swooned. He reaches for his right side and thinks it’s probably true when his hand comes away wet and sticky. Dimly he hears the sound of the two men moving through the house, hears Gene the cab driver insist that the front door is a bad idea, and then the sound of limping steps through the broken detritus in the living room. The sliding glass door opens and then it’s quiet.

Sam lays there, waits for darkness and a reaper and heaven or maybe hell to show up and get on with it. He wonders if he’ll see when it’s done, wonders what the first thing he’ll see in two years will be. He suspects it’ll be his reaper. He hopes they have a friendly face, hopes they can smile and maybe let him have a glimpse of sun in the morning or maybe Phil on his perch before they take him.

Phil, he thinks again. He’s dying, surely he is if the blood on his hand is any indication, but it’s not going quickly. Sam wonders if it’s going to be a slow death, wonders just how long it’ll take him to bleed out. Too long. He doesn’t want to hurry it along by any means, even blind he likes life enough to hang on to what he’s got, but he doesn’t think he’s the kind of person to sit around and wait for it either.

He sits up, or tries too, but ends up sliding off the couch. There’s no coffee table for him to crash into – he and Dean had decided that it was an unnecessary obstacle for him to constantly dodge. Sam thinks that was brilliant of them, especially now when he surely would have crashed into it and done himself further damage. He rolls to his knees and cocks his head as he tries whistling again. It takes him five tries before anything like sound actually comes out. Phil doesn’t sing back him, but Sam thinks maybe he wouldn’t either if he was a tiny songbird that had been so terrified.

Sam stands, grunts with effort and pain, but manages it and thinks that he’s doing pretty well for someone who’s supposed to be dying. It would, he thinks, be a great time to see for himself just how badly he’s been hurt. The knife wound is throbbing, there’s no doubt about that, and he can feel the sticky warmth of blood on his sweatshirt, but is it that bad? Is he really dying and too stupid, too helpless and blind to know? He should call for help, but at the moment all he can really think of is Phil. He’s a tiny thing – how much more help must he need?

It’s hard to navigate across the living room. There’s so much on the floor, so many little things that make it hard to walk without tripping. Being lightheaded doesn’t help and Sam’s tempted to get down on his hands and knees again, tempted to crawl. He’s saved from that by the wall. He puts his hands on it, palms it, and slides his hands across it, trying to orient himself. He comes to a corner and knows that it’s the short hall to the front door. That makes the doorway to the kitchen to his left. He sidesteps, hands on the wall like he’s trying to keep from falling from a great height as he shifts, one step at a time until he comes to the trim that marks the opening into the kitchen.

“Phil? C’mon, buddy. No more assholes around to scare you, I promise.”

The bird doesn’t call back to him, doesn’t so much as cheep or rustle his wings. Sam walks with his arms out until he bumps into a chair. He grips the back of it, steadies himself, and goes towards where he thinks the kitchen counters should be. There’s shit all over the counter – coffee grounds, sugar maybe, and there, something slick and wet that he thinks might be canary droppings.

He finds the broken dish drainer with his feet and knows it’s a miracle really that he didn’t step on glass. Sam thinks he remembers the sound of it breaking, but he’s not sure now if that really happened or if it was part of the dream he had before waking. It’s hard to get down to the floor, fucking agonizing, really. He doesn’t have the coordination to squat, so he goes down on one knee and starts feeling around with his hands, terrified of feeling a limp bird body beneath his fingers. He finds broken glass instead, slices his palm in what he thinks must be the approximate spot of the old scars. Sam smiles grimly, thinks on how he used to rely on the pain from those old cuts, and how it doesn’t do anything for him now, how he doesn’t need them to. He almost wishes that he could sit down with Beth Milner someday and tell her how far he’s come.

The thought’s fleeting – delirium, he supposes – and he continues his search for Phil, more carefully now that he’s picking blindly through broken glass and scattered dishes from the drainer. There’s nothing there, which is good, it means Phil’s not dead on his kitchen floor. But, he’s not anywhere that Sam can find him either. He carefully shoves the mess of broken glass and dishes to the side, closer to the counter he hopes, and though he feels a few new stings as shards of glass gouge his fingers, he doesn’t suffer anything worse.

Sam remains kneeling on the floor, trying to think of where the canary would have flown off to when sound reaches him. It’s nothing much, nothing unsettling, just the sound of a car driving down the street. But, it’s loud, loud enough that he can hear laughter and the sound of twangy southern rock coming from the car’s stereo. The kitchen window. It’s possible that it could be cracked open, like they generally leave it in the mornings when Phil sits on the ledge and sings his guts out, but Sam doesn’t think so. Dean’s anal. He closes windows, checks locks, makes sure the coffee pot and the stove is off. He does it before bed when he makes his rounds through the house, and Sam knows that he gives the house a pass before leaving for work, too. When he sits up, hands on his thighs while he thinks for a second, he remembers now that he never did hear Gene the asshole cabbie or his dickhead friend Carl by the front door. The sound had started in the kitchen and the kitchen, he knows, has a large picture window that faces the front of the house, same as the living room. It’s more than big enough to crawl through if someone opened it from the outside. He’s opened enough windows from the wrong side to know that it’s not difficult, sometimes with old houses and old windows, it’s even really easy. The kitchen, which hasn’t gotten much more than a point job on the cabinets, has such a window.

Sam gets to his feet and walks, one hand outstretched in front of him, the other feeling for the kitchen table to his right. He reaches the wall, feels the cool autumn air blowing, and stretches out his fingers to meet nothing. No glass, no screen, just an open window.

“Where would you go if you were a scared bird? Oh, Phil. Bad time to man up and face the outside, buddy.”

Sam doesn’t even think, not about dying if that’s what he’s doing, and not about being blind. He just thinks about his stupid canary being outside. He’s gone backwards through the kitchen before he knows it, barely registers the knock of one of the kitchen chairs against his hip. He feels along the wall again, turns when he reaches the corner. He stops in front of the hall closet, breathes heavily for a moment, and opens it, feeling around inside.

“Okay, Yancey, you win. You freaking win, you dick.” Sam’s hand closes around the grip of his cane. This one is much like the one in his gym bag, maybe even an exact replica, but it’s not like he can see to really tell. It doesn’t matter, it’ll do. He grabs it, gives it a shake to unfold it, and backs up. It takes him a second to orient himself, a moment to remember what it had been like tapping down the halls of the hospital with Sal, the volunteer who had taken him for his first blind man’s stroll.

He gets it after a second of swinging the cane around a little too wildly. Sam finds the front door easily, perhaps easier than he ever has. He doesn’t have to count the steps from the closet to the front door – two – or feel the wall around him. He walks with the cane in hand until it clicks against wood. It’s too easy and he can’t think of why he’s made such a fuss over using it before now.

The porch is cold beneath his bare feet and Sam quests out with the cane in little taps until the sound deadens, telling him that he’s found what he’s looking for – his sneakers. He’d left them outside after trying to scrape off the dog shit he’d stepped in, had walked into the house in his socks. The laces are still tied, he’d kicked them off without bothering. He has to lean against the house to slip them on, tries not to think about getting dog shit in the open cuts on his hand or anywhere else. Then he takes the cane in hand again and goes.

The front steps are easy to find, the little cement walk that goes down to the street just as easy, but Sam doesn’t take it. He turns and has to swing the cane a little higher because the grass deadens the noise. He’s checking for obstacles now and it’s still not that hard to round the corner of the house and walk alongside to the backyard.

There’s no fence – he and Dean aren’t exactly the picket fences sort. There’s a smallish deck that he works around, but he doesn’t think there are any obstacles in the backyard other than trees and the chain-link fence at the end of the yard that Dean has told him marks the end of the property line and the top of the ravine behind the house.

The cane clangs as it hits metal and Sam walks around the obstacle accordingly, reaching out with his free hand to feel. It’s the lawnmower. They don’t have a shed or a garage to put it in, though Dean has been stashing money away to build a carport big enough to cover the Impala, the mower, and whatever else needs protection from the elements. He remembers Dean telling him that he’s taking to parking the mower under the big tree in their backyard. It’s unconventional and he thinks Dean mentioned covering it with a tarp, but he doesn’t feel anything of the sort now. He supposes it must have blown away.

It never occurs to him to think that Gene and Carl might still be in the backyard, it barely even occurs to him to wonder at the sheer stupidity of a blind man trying to find a wayward canary outside. He doesn’t hear the sound of anyone else, doesn’t hear Phil either, but that doesn’t keep him from whistling now every few feet.

When Sam reaches the chain link fence at the back of the yard, he figures it’s a lost cause. He should go back, should call Dean or an ambulance or somebody if he’s really dying – though he thinks if he is, he’s doing a damn good job of remaining upright. He whistles again, thinks that if he doesn’t hear anything that he’ll give up, head back to the house, call Dean, die, or something.

A bird whistles back from down in the ravine. It’s a songbird, but a canary? He doesn’t know, he can’t tell, but maybe if he gets closer and whistles again, the bird will come to him if it’s Phil. Maybe he won’t give up the trees to sit on Sam’s shoulder, but he might fly closer and sing again – then Sam will know if it’s him or not.

This means he has to go over the fence – not so bad because it doesn’t feel like it’s more than four feet high – and down into the ravine. Which is stupid. Because he’s blind and supposedly dying, at least so he’s been told. The fence isn’t bad. Climbing over it hurts, makes his side where he’d been stabbed burn like a mother-fucker, but he manages it and doesn’t even lose his cane.

The ravine is another matter. It’s steep, the grass is wet, and Sam doesn’t even have moonlight or the weak light of stars to guide him. When he slips and goes down on his butt, making everything hurt so badly that he has to take several seconds to breathe, he decides to stay that way. He folds up the cane, clutches it tight to him and scoots. The wet grass hastens his descent and he’s soon sliding, a little wildly, down the ravine on his ass. Sam laughs. It’s so ridiculous that he can’t help it and he wonders if he’s really feeling good about everything – several dozen injuries be damned – or if he’s just lost so much blood that he’s giddy from shock.

When he stops sliding at the bottom, he stands, wavers badly on his feet, though the dizziness is somehow less disorienting without the sense of the world blurring in front of him. He sucks in a breath, lets it pass, then unfolds the cane again, swinging it a little until he hears rocks tumbling away from the tip. He walks carefully until he feels the gentle slide of gravel beneath his sneakers.

He taps with the cane until he hears the clang of metal. The railroad tracks. It must be. Sam climbs the little hill and steps over the tracks. He whistles again, cocks his head, and waits for the bird to sing back at him. It does. Sam walks the tracks, cane tapping out against railroad ties, gravel, and the metal rails themselves. It’s easy. It’s so easy that he doesn’t stop when he hears someone calling from far away. He just speeds up, walks a little faster, as he whistles now and then, though finding the breath to do so keeps getting harder.

Sam can feel a change in the air, it’s wilder, smells wet, and as the track curves, the cane taps against something higher. He steps forward carefully, swings the cane until it clangs again. He reaches out and palms cool metal. A girder, he thinks. A bridge? Is there a creek or a little river somewhere along the tracks behind their house?

“Sam!”

Someone’s calling for him and Sam thinks he should probably wait, he could use the help, but he hears the bird singing now, thinks it must be Phil because he doesn’t think that normal outside birds generally sing in the night. The sound is coming from below him, not across the train bridge, but closer to creek or the river or whatever it is below it. He probes the ground with the cane. It doesn’t seem steep, doesn’t seem like it’s much of a walk down to the water.

He hears running footsteps and the sound of his name again as he steps carefully over the rail – the cane lets him know where it is. It really is handy. Sam thinks he might tell Charles Yancey so next time he’s at the center in Freemont. Maybe the guy will back off him a little, maybe he’ll try to get him to join in more center activities too, but Sam’s not really down with that. He likes spending time with Dean, likes hanging out with him and their stupid little bird, likes having the girls from the strip club stop over to drink their coffee and bullshit over every day normal things.

He’s just starting to walk across the grass towards the sound of water, when the sound of running stops. Someone grabs hold of him and yanks him back. “No, Sam! Stop, God damn it, stop!”

Dean. Sam’s so glad to have him there that he doesn’t even complain when Dean pulls him backwards off of his feet. He loses the cane though and has to lean forward to find it again. He gets no farther than the circle of Dean’s arms as he pulls him roughly back against his chest.

“There’s a cliff. Sam, stop, there’s a fucking cliff.”

“Oh,” Sam says and feels a little rush of embarrassment. “But… you know, I think Phil’s down there.”

“Jesus Christ, Sam.” Dean tugs on him again, pulls him back against him and though Dean’s not generally a hugging sort of guy, not the touchy feely sort, his brother, Sam thinks it feels kind of nice. “What are you even doing?”

“Phil,” Sam says again, more patiently.

He can feel Dean patting him down, knows from the inward gasp of his breath that he’s found the knife wound and Dean touches him far more gingerly after that, all but cradles him back against his chest.

“Look at you… the fuck happened?”

“Oh, yeah, I think I’m dying or something,” Sam says and knows it must sound stupid, that he must sound a little hysterical. He doesn’t feel hysterical. He feels good. Warm and maybe even content except for the nagging concern for his damned bird.

The last thing he hears his Dean saying, “Like hell you’re dying on me now, Sam.”

He comes up fast, feels himself surface into consciousness with the same shock as breaking his head above freezing water. Sam feels someone push him back down, feels them poke and prod his right side as something sharp pricks at his arm.

“Jesus, I can’t keep him down here, Marie. Drive faster!”

“Then tighten the straps, Reggie, you tool. Freemont Regional this is EST 19 coming in from Rafferty. We have a thirty-three year old male trauma. Stab wound with a possible liver lac. Mulitple abrasions. BP’s climbing. One seventy-five over ninety-seven. Sat’s eight-eight. Respers twenty-six. Temp ninety-nine. Possible spinal trauma. Patient’s boarded with collar in place and strapped down. Be advised.”

“Copy EST 19. We have the light on for you.”

“Keep the coffee hot, Mags, we’ll be there in fifteen.”

Sam hear a blast of static and then nothing but sirens and the sound of packages being ripped open around him. The pressure at his arm his back and he tries to pull away from it, but his hands are secure at his sides. He doesn’t like being restrained in the dark, never has, but even less so after a thousand years of torture in the cage. He strains, pushes against the feel of nylon at his wrists and across his chest, but he can’t get anywhere.

“It’s okay, Sam. You’re name’s Sam, right? I’m Reggie, I’m an EMT. You’re okay, Sam. Try to be calm, we’re taking you to a hospital.”

“Dean,” Sam chokes out. The sound is muffled and he becomes aware of the feel of plastic over his face. He tries to turn his head, but can’t. He’s suffocating beneath the mask and the feel of hard plastic clamped tight around his neck. “Choking!”

“No, no, you’re not. It’s okay. It’s just a C-Collar to protect your spine. Dean’s your brother, right?”

“Brother,” Sam answers and feels himself grow a tiny bit calmer with the word. “He’s my brother.”

“Dean’s following us. Tearing like a bat out of hell in that badass car of his. I think he maybe thinks we’re going too slow. Good driver, your brother?”

“Best,” _driver,_ Sam thinks, but that isn’t what comes out. “Best brother.”

“That’s good, Sam. That’s real good. Gonna give you a little something…”

Sam tries to tell him that he doesn’t want it, but he feels the burn in his arm before he can get it out. It’s supposed to take a while to kick in, hell, he remembers more times than he can count when pain medication didn’t even touch him, but he feels a dreamy sort of wave come over him instantly and wonders what kind of good shit just hit his veins.

“S’nice,” Sam mumbles, then goes out again.

 “Sam? Can you hear me?”

He shudders, makes a small, hurt noise that sounds too pathetic to be anything like the "sure" he'd been aiming for. He tries to turn towards the sound of the voice, but can't. He tenses, or tries to, only to go limp again with exhaustion and some small measure of reassurance when he realizes that it's Doctor Milner at his side. She takes his hand, gives it a small squeeze.

“Beth.”

“I’m here, Sam. Came in to check on a couple of my patients and saw you coming into the ER. I thought I'd better make sure that you're going to be fine. Which you are… fine, I mean.”

“Okay,” Sam replies and squeezes her hand again. “Is Dean here?”

“They’re taking you to surgery, Sam. But, I’ll get him in to see you as soon as I can. I promise.”

“Beth?”

“What, Sam?”

“You sound just like Ellen.” He thinks he should have told her that he used his cane earlier and that it was good, helpful, even, but doesn’t get the chance.

Sam’s throat is sore when he wakes. There’s an awful taste in his mouth, one made worse by the total and apparent absence of all spit. He tries to lick his lips, feels nothing but the dry rasp of his tongue over cracked lips. He feel stiff, feels like he went ten rounds with Godzilla, and it takes a few seconds for him to figure out why that is.

The sound and smells around him help him piece things together and Sam knows from the steady chirp of machines and the sterile, alcoholic air just barely covering the lingering odor of shit that he’s in a hospital. He moves his hand, doesn’t find it restrained by anything other than IV tubing. He doesn’t feel a collar around his neck, but further probing does lead him to discover wires attached to his chest beneath thin fabric. He prods at his side gingerly, winces with a sharp jolt of pain that’s his body’s way of reminding him not to touch, and feels something bulky like bandages.

“Dean?” His voice is wrecked, dry aching throat not helping him any and Sam’s not surprised that no one answers his faint rasping call.

He listens, expands his sense in some kind of blind equivalent of having a look around. The blanket over him is surprisingly soft, the bed typically too short so that it feels like his feet are pressed right up against the footboard. He can hear the squeak of sneakers on tile floor, the clinking of metal on metal, and the sound of female voices chatting not far away. He fumbles in his bed, trying to feel for something like a call light because previous time in a hospital has taught him that it’s generally in the bed with him somewhere. He’s just found it when he hears the sound of breathing.

It’s coming from the bed next to him and Sam sniffs a little, catches the faint odor of Dean’s nearly expired cologne and his definitely useless deodorant. He relaxes, leaves the call light where it is on the bed next to him and reaches out.

He makes contact with skin and catches Dean’s wrist, even now able to find him in the darkness with ease. “Hey,” he says and when that does nothing, he squeezes Dean’s wrist and tries in vain to wet his lips again.

Dean turns his hand and squeezes him back, possibly before he’s even fully awake. Sam can hear him sit up, can hear a few pops as his back creaks a little, but Dean doesn’t pay it any mind or even stretch. He just tightens his grip on Sam’s hand and leans forward in a wave of unwashed brother and fairly rank breath.

“Sammy.”

“Thirsty,” Sam rasps.

“Don’t think you’re supposed to have anything just yet, but… what the hell. Nurse Don’t-be-makin’-any-fuss-in-my-ward gave me a little 7Up earlier. I think it was a payoff so I’d stop being a dick.”

Sam feels Dean lean in, feels the plastic of a straw at his lips and clamps down on it. He sucks it down, ignores Dean telling him to go easy, and thinks that there’s never been anything quite as heavenly as somewhat cool, watered down 7Up in his mouth. He chases the straw when Dean pulls the cup away, but can’t find it in the constant darkness. He rests back against the pillow and refrains from telling Dean he’s a chintzy bastard.

“Why were you being a dick?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Sam,” Dean says and he sounds tired, sounds like he hasn’t slept in days. “Someone just kicked the shit out of my brother and trashed my house. It kind of puts me in a bad place, I guess.” He waits a beat. “Dumbass.”

Sam reaches for his hand again and he must have scared the shit out of Dean because he doesn’t do anything but take Sam’s hand and hold onto it. No cracks about him being a girl, no groans, nothing. Dean just holds onto him like maybe he’s been doing it for a while, even though Sam can feel a bandage and gauze wrapped around it.

“Technically,” he says, keeping a comfortable hold on Dean’s hand, “I think the ass kicking was mutual.”

“Oh, you got that right,” Dean says and he sounds proud, sounds a little awed even. “Wallace tracked down the guys from a wallet left on the living room floor. Said when he caught up to Gene Farber and Carl somebody douchebag that they looked like they’d lost a couple of cage fights.

“Wallace… Sherriff Wallace?” Sam sits up, but gets only an inch off the bed before the pain in his side drives him back down. “Shit, that hurts.”

“I’ll call your nurse…”

“No, no, it’s fine. Dean, Sherriff Wallace? Fuck… you, me, and the law, Dean. That’s not good. We gotta…”

“We gotta do nothing, Sam,” Dean says firmly. “You just have to lay there and rest and I have to… well, I just have to sit here. Okay? It’s fine.”

“But…”

“It’s _fine_ , Sam. You and me,” and his voice drops to a whisper, “we’re just Sam and Dean Winslow now, remember? Our IDs are so good that we get electric bills and pay frickin’ taxes, man. What we don’t do is run away and kick up a fuss. Charlie’s good, Sam. Real good. We’re not going to get found out, though when I file taxes in January, I’m maybe gonna wish otherwise.”

“Charlie? Y-Yancey?”

“Dude, you still coming down from the anesthesia?” Dean gives his hand another gentle squeeze. “Char _lie_. As in Bradbury, geek girl hacker supreme that set all this shit up for us, remember?”

“Oh.” He does remember. Remembered Dean driving while Sam sat in pissed off darkness the weeks after his infection, searching like mad for Charlie only to have her find them and threaten to alert every law enforcement agency she could think of if they didn’t stop trying to sniff her out. She’d gone pitiful after discovering that Sam was blind and he supposes that’s part of why she’d been willing to work out some IDs for them. Sam knew they were solid, now that he thought about it. Charlie’s own alternate identities had passed muster for years.

“So, we’re okay.”

“Yeah, genius, that’s what I’m trying to tell you – we’re fine. Hell, Wallace didn’t even lift any prints. He just strolled in with the wallet and those two dickheads started singing like canaries. Speaking of…”

“Phil!” Sam tries to sit up again and manages it this time, though Dean has to push the button that makes the head of the bed raise. He sinks back against it gratefully and lets go of Dean’s hand so that he can flail a bit. “Dean, I heard him. He sounded terrified and there was broken glass and the open window – that’s why I was outside. I was trying to find him. Shit, he must be so scared.”

“God, you and that bird. Man, I swear, it’s unhealthy. He’s okay, Sammy. Little bastard high tailed it to my bedroom, must have flown around crapping on everything for a while because Wendy says there’s bird shit all over my room.”

Sam leans back and sighs in relief – the oxygen tubing in his nose makes it a bit easier. “You called the girls?”

He can hear what sounds like Dean running his hand over stubble, but he doesn’t stay away long. He drops a hand down on Sam’s arm like the contact is somehow vital to him. “Yeah – you were outside on the train tracks looking for him, what else was I going to do? Besides, I ditched work when your call came in and you weren’t on the phone. Wendy kept calling to check in on what was wrong and I was kinda going out of my mind in the waiting room, so I stayed on the phone with her a while. Helped keep me from climbing the walls, I guess.”

“She’s awesome,” Sam tells him tentatively.

“She is,” Dean allows, but doesn’t say anything further. “Anyway, your fucking bird’s cool. Wendy’s got him at home, even locked up her kids’ cat so he won’t try to add a little protein to his diet.”

“Tell her, Dean tell her thank you for me.”

“Oh, don’t worry, you can tell her. The whole mess of girls from the club are probably going to be up here sooner or later. Veronica’s hoping there’s a single doctor or one looking to be a divorcé that she can sink her hooks into. Hey…”

“What?”

“Hold on, I got an idea.”

Sam has no idea what he’s up to, though he gets an inkling when he hears Dean speaking. “Hey, Wendy – he’s fine and guess who he’s asking for. Yeah? Of course he is, listen I’m going to put you on speaker phone and I know it’s lame, but it’s Sam and _he’s_ kind of lame…”

“Runs in the family,” Sam grouses mildly, but smiles as soon he hears the racket of little girls singing and Phil singing back. Sam thinks it’s one of the best sounds he’s heard in a long time. He whistles, knows it’s kind of silly, but he can’t stop himself. There’s a hitch in the singing, the girls quit altogether and then start to giggle as Phil whistles back.

“Sam, he’s singing to you,” one of the little girls, Elenore, he thinks, exclaims. “I think he misses you!” The entire Worthy household starts whistling then, when they can amidst giggles, and Phil never once stops singing in reply.

Sam grins and closes his eyes. “I’m glad we don’t have to leave, you know.”

Dean tells Wendy goodbye and then reaches for him again, his hand in Sam’s bandaged one as he gives it a squeeze. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam tells him. “Being blind sucks, but I like it here. Well, at home anyway. I don’t want to go.”

“And if Cas, well, it doesn’t matter. Like you said, Cas is…”

“Yeah,” Sam says sleepily. “Cas is, but maybe someday he won’t be and that’d be cool. It’d be nice to have him around, whether he can fix me or not.  I don’t care. It’d just be nice to have everyone under one roof for a change.”

“Very nice,” Dean says. “Christ, we are domesticated.”

“I know,” Sam replies. “Cool, isn’t it?”

Dean leans over him, doesn’t kiss him or anything like that – it’s Dean after all – just leans in for a second before he lowers his bed back down and grabs the control for the call bell and the television. He flips it on and starts channel surfing, one hand comfortingly on Sam’s chest as he skips channels on the TV.

“Except for the last thirty-six hours? It surprisingly doesn’t suck,” Dean tells him and then settles on what sounds to Sam like an episode of The X-Files.

END

**Author's Note:**

> I want to take a moment to thank my artist Ibrahil for all of her amazing art and hard work. And this while not having the internet working. I'm floored and thrilled and beg you to check out the art post here: http://evian-fork.livejournal.com/105956.html
> 
> For further details on the fic itself, please check out the LJ posting: http://rainylemons.livejournal.com/49568.html
> 
> Thanks!


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